THE TOP TEN
Emeril’s New Orleans
800 Tchoupitoulas St. 528-9393
Sunday, October 24, 2004

By Brett Anderson
Restaurant critic

At Emeril’s, it is hard to ignore that you are dining in a corporate enterprise. There are the logos and the famous dishes, some of which you may know from television. Often you’ll find the namesake’s latest cookbook on display. And there are the crowds, a fringe benefit of full-force, cross-media publicity. Fourteen years past its opening day, Emeril’s remains, in my experience, the most difficult-to-obtain reservation in New Orleans.

Stay away if any of this bothers you, but understand you’ll be missing out on all the good that comes from that corporate muscle. For starters, the wine list is among the finest in the southeast United States, and the confident, relaxed professionalism of the staff suggests the institution dumps capital into training. Best of all, while every Emeril’s chef needs to uphold a specific, crowd-pleasing culinary identity, Chris Wilson, chef de cuisine at the flagship, is provided the sort of leeway you’d never see at a mere chain. Earlier this year he cooked a tasting-menu of pitch-perfect German food to match the wines of August Kesseler, the distinguished German winemaker who made a special trip for the occasion. In the summer, I got my first taste of the season’s ballyhooed wild salmon; the same meal brought house-made andouille and boudin, a hauntingly dark country gumbo, hot-from-the-oven cornbread, insalata caprese finished with a fine aged balsamic, juicy quail hemorrhaging stuffing. I like the restaurant’s energy and many of its signatures. But I love the sense that it’s staffed by a clutch of well-trained food and wine enthusiasts reveling in their considerable resources. When it all comes together, the staggering success seems well-earned.

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