Certain icons make new orleans different. Hot jazz on the street corner. Beignets as light as air, paired with coffee that kicks. Bourbon Street in all its rough-hewn glory. And, of course, Emeril Lagasse.
Twenty-five years after arriving in the Crescent City, the man who practically invented the concept of the celebrity chef is a household name and the head of a culinary empire. Luckily for visitors here, he maintains three restaurants in New Orleans, each with its own identity.
As late-afternoon light slants through the window of Emeril’s Restaurant, Emeril himself sits at a quiet table and talks about his businesses in this city the way a proud father talks about his kids. He describes how this building was a dilapidated warehouse when he bought it. “I would duck my head in here, and I would see the magic of the space,” he says. “This brick warehouse with steel, wood, and concrete was masculine, and it really appealed to me. There was a connection between what I felt my style of food was, who I was and am as a person, and what this space meant.”
Emeril’s Restaurant opened in 1990. Three years later, he debuted NOLA, a funky spot in the French Quarter “doing rustic Acadian Creole with a lot of Vietnamese influences,” he says, as a nod to the fact that he’s had a Vietnamese family working with him “since day one.”
In 1998 Emeril’s Delmonico brought the chef full circle from his days cooking classic cuisine at Commander’s Palace. The original Delmonico’s opened in 1895 in the same building it occupies now. Again, the chef says the space inspired him: “The upstairs parlor was still the owners’ home, and something came out and grabbed me about history and tradition. The lightbulb started going off about my tenure at Commander’s Palace, how that was such grand New Orleans cuisine. Now Emeril’s Delmonico has evolved into being another New Orleans classic.”
Just like the chef himself.
