this is the sound You notice first. What Is it? A tone somewhere between a growl and a growl, with more resonance and authority than you’d expect from the face of the boy in front of you. Pronunciation, well… it’s one of those optical illusions that shimmers from one thing to another depending on the lighting. The words swirl there like pinball, careering, often over the course of a sentence, from Mississippi to Mayfair, from the smooth shores of the Upper East Side to the marshy line of the Florida Panhandle, pinging from Stockholm, and then falling into the crunch of immigrant vowels that link the mills and docklands of New Orleans to the mills and docklands of the Northeast. In short, a vocal map of points is probably not connected anywhere on Earth except to the person whose mouth is producing the remarkable sound.
“It’s different, that’s for sure,” his own mother says after laughing for a long time.
There are a lot of things that are different, even unique, about EJ Lagasse, who last fall at the age of 22 became the youngest chef to claim two Michelin stars for his restaurant in the guide’s rating system’s century-long history. But let’s start with the obvious way he isn’t strictly Unique: EJ Lagasse is more correctly Emeril John Lagasse IV. His father is Emeril John Lagasse III, meaning: Emeril!
Once, and perhaps still, the most famous chef in America, Emeril III was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, and came to New Orleans in 1982 to take over the kitchen at Commander’s Palace from the legendary Paul Prudhomme. There, he began to invent a boisterous, modern Creole cuisine, “New New Orleans Cooking”, as he titled his first cookbook. In 1990, he started Emeril’s in a decaying warehouse district on his own. But it was on television that Emeril became a household name, but in the process he single-handedly invented the celebrity chef. His catchphrases (“Bomb!” “Kick it up a notch!”) were ubiquitous. He hosted a cooking and talk show five days a week, Emeril Live, and even starred, albeit briefly, in the NBC sitcom that bore his name. His influence is felt everywhere from Anthony Bourdain to Guy Fieri, from hipster pork buns to Jack Daniels’ glazed steaks at TGI Fridays. Meanwhile, Emeril Restaurant, which was always a more serious restaurant than other projects bearing its name, would have you believe it has grown old in an institution. It was perhaps a time capsule of Lagasse’s heyday – serving such baroque flavor bombs as tamarind-glazed double-cut pork chop with green sesame seeds over caramelized sweet potatoes – but, like a loud, slightly clingy uncle, it was always good to know the restaurant was there.
Four years ago, EJ Lagasse returned to his home in New Orleans, where he had spent part of his childhood, with the intention of completely redesigning Emeril. He had spent the past several years in some of the rarest kitchens in New York and Europe, and he had the same dream for his father’s restaurants: Instead of being loud, Emeril’s restaurants would be refined. Instead of double-cut pork chops, it will feature a modern luxury tasting menu at modern luxury prices. Instead of 350 diners per night, it will serve less than a quarter of that number. The result will resemble the kind of restaurants that receive stars from Michelin, which is rumored to be expanding its guide to New Orleans for the first time. And instead of Emeril Lagasse III, the face of the new Emeril will be Emeril Lagasse IV. He was 19 years old.
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The now-transformed Emeril’s has been ranked number 30 on North America’s 50 Best Restaurants; Now that Riley and Chatto have welcomed it into their fold and Michelin has handed out its stars; Now that EJ has been named a finalist for a James Beard Award new york Times Awarding his own restaurant three stars, he has declared it “utterly charming”; And now that the reservation book is forever packed to the brim, with hundreds of people on the waiting list every night… now, everyone likes to pretend that this was all a perfectly normal idea all along.
This was not a common idea. In fact, it was completely cuckoo. Whatever old Emeril’s was, it was filled with conventioneers and locals. New Orleans, for all its culinary splendor, has never embraced modernity, much less the fancy ideas of so-called more sophisticated cities. Handing the keys to a teenager with strange notions seemed risky at best, like getting involved in a Nepo Baby’s egotistical vanity project at worst. Instead, by any measure, his restaurant is a triumph, another testament to the deceptively awkward young man at its center.
