You hear that Emeril Lagasse’s son has completely reworked Emeril’s, his father’s 35-year-old flagship restaurant in the Warehouse District of New Orleans, and maybe you imagine that it’s more on-trend now, more casual, more glou glou.
But no, if you spot a po’ boy, it will be a dainty, tweezer-assembled miniature, an elegant one-biter the size of a single fried oyster, which is of course what it holds.
The chef E.J. Lagasse has remade Emeril’s as an extravagance where jackets are recommended and dinner is a bouncy, often delicious, occasionally self-referential but utterly charming ride through the flavors of New Orleans.
The tasting menu — the only menu — announces itself as a tidy six courses. But that’s not counting the torrent of amuse bouches! The sticky deluge of petit fours! Or the embarrassment of carts that servers wheel around with glee.
These carry Champagne, or a mountain of butter from Isigny Sainte-Mère, or an enchantment of cheeses under glass cloches, or a flight of syrups to drench the shave ice that will lead you into dessert (including the mysteriously pink, vanilla-scented “cream of nectar” from local sno-ball shop Hansen’s).
It’s all too much, but sometimes too muchness is a delight.
Beyond the talent and energy of the kitchen and dining room, you pick up on a sincere affection for the tasting menu as a form, and for the baroque, nearly obsolete mechanics of fine dining. (I mean, when was the last time you saw servers slip on gloves to set down shining, fingerprint-prone plates?)
E.J. Lagasse is 22 and has been set on becoming a chef since he was 9, when he celebrated his mother’s birthday with a family dinner at Café Boulud (in its Gavin Kaysen era). He had the resources to start early, helping out as a boy at his father’s restaurants and then working for years in the kitchen at Le Bernardin as a teenager. By the time he was 19, Mr. Lagasse was made chef and co-owner of Emeril’s, shutting the place down for major renovations in the summer of 2023.
When it reopened, the dining room was smaller, with fewer, more luxuriously appointed tables, most of them with a clear view of the grand, spot-lit kitchen and its brigade through floor-to-ceiling glass.
When Emeril’s opened in 1990, the Times-Picayune critic at the time, Gene Bourg, called the menu “a manifesto, aimed at radically altering the way we think of Creole cooking.”
The kitchen was serious, making all of its own breads and andouille, but within a few years — bam! — Emeril Lagasse was tapped by the Food Network and became a first-name-only celebrity with an empire of restaurants, TV shows, merchandising, endorsements and that iconic catchphrase.
Part of what’s remarkable about Emeril’s now, part of why it works, is that E.J. Lagasse doesn’t seem constrained by any of that history, so much as driven by it.
The smoked salmon cheesecake diners might remember from the ’90s is elegantly remade, paved with caviar and held in a fine, buttery pastry. In dishes like this one, there’s a reverence for the old menu, but also the tactful editing that comes with tending to a family legacy.
The cooking tends toward the unapologetically lavish. A little link of smoked boudin, decidedly tender with rice, is also a vehicle for foie gras. There is more in that pool of sauce — a Creole jus gras mounted with pieces of foie as if it were butter.
There is even more in the oyster stew, made with tapioca poached in dashi. Though Mr. Lagasse said it’s not a direct homage to Thomas Keller’s “oyster and pearls,” that era of winky-faced, ultra-luxurious ’90s fine dining is also a part of this restaurant’s core programming.
There’s not much abstracting familiar flavors and dishes into unrecognizable forms (sprays, jellies, foams). And while the kitchen does modernize and update, Mr. Lagasse reorients you to the pleasures of trout almondine simply by making it well and presenting it with care (and an abundance of Marcona almonds).
The kitchen also has a fondness for miniaturizing. Mr. Lagasse picked up on a prawn cracker technique from the local Vietnamese institution Pho Tau Bay, to form the bite-size fluted tart shell that holds a heap of barbecue shrimp pieces, but breaks delicately.
And on my first meal there, I tasted an extraordinarily dark gumbo with deep, concentrated flavor, using a spoon so tiny it could have belonged to a Calico Critter (I quickly decided to drink from the cup).
The mini, but exuberantly tall banana cream pie is only a slight reimagining of the one on Emeril’s opening menu. It’s a beauty, though a slightly darker caramel would help give it the dimension and depth it deserves. And I thought a cute, but rather bland slice of Doberge cake couldn’t quite justify its presence on the table in terms of taste, only in how well it fit the menu’s narrative.
When a meal is well executed at this level, the complaints will start to sound absurd. But it’s true, the Champagne could have been a little colder! And a cheese set out too recently didn’t have the time it needed to open up. I was surprised when the undercooked absinthe caramels on one visit stuck to their wrapping papers and I had to scrape mine up with the edge of a knife.
There is room for Emeril’s to grow in consistency, to dial in temperature and timing, and maybe to workshop its tight laminated bun and slightly dreary cornbread. Supplements on tasting menus are always a drag, but on this $225 tasting, $40 for the duck instead of the beef seemed unreasonable.
The luxuries of classic fine dining aren’t being ironically recontextualized at Emeril’s, they’re being exalted, and the joy of the place is in how much it goes all out. But it’s also in how the restaurant brings exuberance and warmth to a form that can so easily feel tired, or cold to the touch.
My biggest concern one night in late summer, when the city tends to slow down, was that the dining room at Emeril’s wasn’t full. It should have been.
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Tejal Rao is a chief restaurant critic for The Times.
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