How Emeril Lagasse Became One of America’s First Celebrity Chefs

Twenty years ago, a cabal of celebrity chefs drove to the heart of Nevada’s aptly-named Valley of Fire to play touch football and eat sandwiches. A wanderer, heat-dazed and peckish, might have wondered if they’d hallucinated Paul Bartolotta, Todd English, Bradley Ogden, and Elizabeth Blau — all proprietors of restaurants in white-hot Las Vegas — frolicking on the sandstone and tucking into tuna salad and nectarine tartlets on an Independence Day. To this day, the writer of the accompanying July 2005 Food & Wine story (our executive wine editor Ray Isle) and then editor-in-chief Dana Cowin have no concrete memory of the event and might, too, have written it all off as a mirage were it not for the photographs, which include evidence of the group grabbing quarters of opulent, round muffuletta sandwiches made by one Emeril Lagasse.

Lagasse himself was not in attendance in the desert that day — the muffulettas had come from the MGM Grand outpost of Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House (still in operation) — but by this point in his career, his famous near-mononym may as well have been spelled out in olives and mortadella atop each sandwich. As is typical of his nearly three dozen recipes that have graced the pages of F&W over the years, this rendition of the then-99-year-old regional classic is decked out beyond the standard model.

1985: Emeril debuts in Food & Wine

F&W first spotlighted Lagasse in a 1985 feature on the legendary Commander’s Palace. It was five years into Lagasse’s tenure, and doyenne-owner Ella Brennan referred to her 28-year-old executive chef as “Emeril the jewel.” Writer (and F&W editor in chief) William Rice described him as “a young man with a ready smile, a questioning and creative mind, a strong sense of discipline and the cool of a veteran NFL quarterback.” He also noted that the watchwords of the Cajun-influenced, Haute Creole kitchen established by Lagasse’s predecessor, Louisiana icon Paul Prudhomme, were “Pow!” and “authentic.”

Lagasse, a talented percussionist, turned down a scholarship to New England Conservatory of Music in favor of a culinary track at Johnson & Wales and the “Pow!” came naturally.  The local authenticity took some effort. Under the tutelage of Brennan, Lagasse — a Portuguese and French Canadian kid from Massachusetts­ — steeped himself in local restaurants, cookbooks, newspapers, and kitchens. He took to the cuisine like a duck to water. Then he soared.

1994 – 2007: Audiences get to know the Essence of Emeril

Thanks to streaming TV, watching Emeril's evolution over the past 30 years is a click away. In a Season 1 episode of Essence of Emeril airing in April 1995 on the fledgling Food Network, a borderline wonkish Lagasse, solo on a rickety kitchen set, stumbles slightly on his words and returns from a commercial break, textbook in hand. He reads aloud a lengthy passage about the etymology of “po’boy” (the subject of the previous segment). He then pays homage to the Italian immigrants behind New Orleans’ Central Grocery (where the muffuletta was invented in 1906) and bygone Progress Market (which made the sandwich since 1924), assembling a textbook version of the muffulettas the rival shops perfected. Italian seeded bread, provolone, mortadella, salami, ham, lettuce, tomato, and a green-and-black-olive salad. “Olive salad, that’s correct!” he says to the camera as if it were an elementary school child who’d shyly offered an answer.

1997 -2007: Emeril goes live

Just seven years later, cemented in his stature as an authority on neo-Creole cuisine with multiple restaurants, a GQ Chef of the Year accolade, and the rapt Emeril Live studio audience he'd been building up since the show's premiere in 1997, Lagasse is in his element in front of a television camera. “The Elvis of food,” as fellow Food Network megastar and unabashed fan Guy Fieri calls him.

In one July 2002 Emeril Live episode, Lagasse laughs at his own enthusiasm over the minutiae of breadmaking — a throwback to the teenage job at a Portuguese bakery that gave rise to his love of cooking.  “Enough of that Professor Lagasse thing!” he roars and loads up this muffuletta with an extravagant multi-olive and shallot salad before pausing. “But…if you want to kick it up a notch!”

There’s no “if” here. An audience member nearly snaps her neck nodding in the moments before he tosses chili flakes into the mix. “Aw, yeah, baby!” Lagasse coos. The audience oohs at every step. Mozzarella, mortadella, capicolla, provolone, more of each all stuffed into a slightly hollowed, freshly baked, double-handed whole loaf of bread. It’s much too much, which means it’s just right.

Tinfoil Swans

2005: Muffulettas in the desert in Food & Wine

By the July 2005 F&W story, those deluxe muffs are decked with capers, kalamatas, giardiniera, and a pepperoncini on the side. It’s just weeks before Hurricane Katrina forever alters New Orleans and Lagasse has a very young son at home. That kid, Emeril John Lagasse IV, now age 21 is known to the world as E.J. He’s the co-owner, with his father, of their first Portuguese spot, the newly-opened 34, as well as the chef-patron of the flagship Emeril’s that’s been in the same location it’s been since 1990. Unlike his father, E.J. was born with gumbo in his veins. He grew up on the set of Emeril Live, and made his first appearance in F&W at age 7.

Last year, the duo appeared together again in F&W, on the Tinfoil Swans podcast. Give it a listen. Hearing Lagasse and his son discussing the nuances of andouille and the restaurant’s signature Potato Alexa is as heartwarming as a muffuletta in the desert.