Emeril Lagasse

Current Company

Emeril's Restaurants — Founder & Chairman

From Commander's Palace to a Culinary Empire

Emeril Lagasse's apprenticeship at Commander's Palace in New Orleans under Ella Brennan — widely regarded as the most important restaurateur in the history of Southern cuisine — gave him both the culinary foundation and the business acumen that would distinguish his career from those of his contemporaries. Brennan's philosophy that restaurants should be run as disciplined businesses, not artistic vanity projects, shaped Lagasse's approach to every venture he subsequently launched. When he opened Emeril's in the Warehouse District in 1990, it was not just a restaurant but a business designed from the start to generate the kind of consistent revenue that could fund expansion — a mindset that was rare among serious chefs at the time but that proved prescient as the restaurant industry evolved.

Lagasse's cuisine — which he calls 'New New Orleans,' a fusion of traditional Creole and Cajun cooking with Portuguese, Asian, and Southwestern influences — reflected his Fall River, Massachusetts, upbringing (his mother was French-Canadian, his father Portuguese) filtered through his New Orleans training. The result was food that was simultaneously familiar and surprising, rooted in tradition but unafraid to improvise — a quality that translated perfectly to television, where Lagasse's cooking became as much performance as instruction. His restaurants, which eventually expanded to locations in New Orleans, Las Vegas, Bethlehem, and Miramar Beach, maintained a level of culinary seriousness that distinguished them from the celebrity-chef restaurants that would proliferate in the 2000s.

The Chef Who Made Food Television a Business

Lagasse's impact on the Food Network — and through it, on American food culture — is difficult to overstate. 'Emeril Live,' which debuted in 1997, transformed cooking television from instructional programming into entertainment. The show's studio audience, Lagasse's band, and his signature exclamations ('Bam!' 'Kick it up a notch!' 'Happy, happy, happy!') created an energy and spectacle that had never been seen in food media. The show's success proved that cooking could be as engaging as any other form of entertainment, and it opened the door for every cooking competition, food travel show, and chef-driven reality program that followed. Lagasse did not just appear on the Food Network — he helped define what food television could be.

What distinguished Lagasse from many of the celebrity chefs who followed in his wake was his ability to maintain culinary credibility while building a mass-market brand. His restaurants continued to earn praise from serious food critics, his cookbooks (more than 20, with millions of copies sold) offered genuinely useful recipes rather than ghostwritten vanity projects, and his product lines — from spice blends to cookware to a line of appliances — were developed with the same attention to quality that characterized his restaurants. The result was a brand that worked at every price point, from a $3 bottle of Emeril's Original Essence seasoning to a $200 tasting menu at his New Orleans flagship — a range that reflected Lagasse's fundamental belief that great food should be accessible to everyone, not reserved for an elite few.