For my first dinner at Nola since it reopened six weeks ago, I needed my wife and teenage daughter’s fine eyes for design and service. I don’t think I’m cool enough for Emeril’s experimental bistro.
Read more »

‘From Emeril’s Kitchen’ Live TV Special to Air July 16 on Shop at Home
Wednesday July 13, 2005

Food Network personality Emeril Lagasse will demo Emeril-brand products during live appearances at 11 a.m., 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. ET on Saturday, July 16, 2005

NASHVILLE, Tenn.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–July 13, 2005– Emeril Lagasse is known for being a Food Network personality, a celebrity chef, and a restauranteur. And on Saturday, July 16, Emeril Lagasse will add Shop at Home host to his growing list of credentials.

Read more »

2006 South Beach Wine & Food Festival Presented by Food & Wine Magazine Celebrates Its Fifth Anniversary Friday, February 24 - Sunday, February 26, 2006
Thursday June 9, 11:43 am ET

MIAMI BEACH, Fla., June 9 /PRNewswire/ — Building upon four phenomenally successful years, the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, hosted by Southern Wine & Spirits of Florida and Florida International University, plans to celebrate its fifth anniversary in 2006 with some of the world’s greatest culinary superstars and wine and spirits personalities, all of whom will converge in South Beach for three glorious days of non-stop food and wine indulgence, Friday, February 24 - Sunday, February 26.

Read more »

Wednesday, May 4, 2005

Bam! Emeril helps spice up PS cafeteria

Spice king Emeril Lagasse kicked it up a notch at a Harlem school cafeteria yesterday as giddy students savored their good fortune.
“I want to live here,” second-grader Keletigui James Kaba said as she gazed across the Children’s Storefront School’s renovated kitchen on E. 129th St. “This place is heaven.”

Lagasse redesigned the independent school’s bland-basement cafeteria as part of the Food Network’s “All-Star Kitchen Makeover”

The celebrity chef replaced the cafeteria’s drab white walls with murals of dancing bananas, bike-riding onions and soccer-ball playing apples - Bam!

The kitchen’s pillars also were covered in baby blue mosaic tiles, and waterproof floors were installed.

New stainless steel refrigerators brimming with leafy greens were a hit with the cajun chef. But the kids’ enjoyed the new ice cream machine much more.

“This has inspired children to know dreams are possible,” Lagasse said. “This kitchen will continue to keep touching people.”

School chef Anthony Jenkins promised to whip up fried chicken and fries for students today using his new deep fryer. “I can’t wait to get started,” he said.

Kathleen Lucadamo

by Cynthia Ward Vesey, Senior Editor

Reprinted with the permission of Home World Business, ICD Publications

CHICAGO March 20 2005 - The Wedgwood Housewares Group, a new division of Wedgwood, will launch the Emeril Professional collection of dinnerware, food prep and oven-to-table pieces here at the International Home & Housewares Show.

The new Emeril tableware joins a growing stable of housewares licensed by popular restauranteur, TV personality and author Chef Emeril Lagasse. The Emerilware line includes cookware and bakeware by All-Clad and cutlery by Wusthof.
Read more »

New York Daily News
March 25, 2005

A newly renovated school cafeteria - Bam!
Celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse stopped in at a Harlem school yesterday to tell pizza-eating students he is going to soup up their cafeteria as part of a cable television contest.

“Not only did you win, you won me, too,” Lagasse told kids at the Children’s Storefront School on E.129th St.

“We aren’t just going to kick it up, we are going to kick it up a big notch,” Lagasse vowed.

The independent, tuition-free school entered the Food Network’s “All-Star Kitchen Makeover” contest, in which celebrity chefs, including Bobby Flay and Lagasse, overhaul old kitchens. The Children’s Storefront is the first school to win.

“This is the greatest moment of my life,” said fourth-grader Olivia Thompson, a star-struck 9-year-old.

Over the next month, Lagasse and his helpers will install a new oven and refrigerator and bring in fans and warming ovens, school officials said. The renovated kitchen should be completed by April 22.

“Our kitchen is pretty old and run-down,” said Kathy Egmont, head of Children’s Storefront, where 170 students are enrolled in prekindergarten through eighth grade. “We will be able to cook more food more quickly and have a better variety of lunches,” she said.

The school is housed in what used to be a single-family home and has been dishing out lunch from a basement cafeteria for 39 years.

Students seemed to care little yesterday about the type of food the new cafeteria would serve. Many just wanted to know what color the walls would be painted.

“I think they should paint it red - Bam! - and blue,” Olivia said.

Kathleen Lucadamo

National Public Radio
Americans’ Insatiable Hunger for Celebrity Chefs
by Ari Shapiro

All Things Considered, March 5, 2005 - The cult of the TV celebrity chef is larger today than ever before. It is now possible for chefs to reach millions of people through a multimedia empire — with books, restaurants, TV shows and even commercial endorsements.

Chefs have become so big that some — like Emeril Lagasse, the current titan of TV chefs — are recognizable by one word alone. Lagasse says he’s amazed at how much things have changed just in the last 10 years.

“Chefs weren’t really respected other than being in the kitchen,” Lagasse says. “You rarely saw them in the dining room interacting with people. . . Now all of a sudden, people have started looking at chefs and saying, ‘Wow! That person really is a craftsman, is really a business person, they can do publicity.’”

That publicity has helped some create cooking empires — books, TV shows, cookware lines and restaurants that pack in the crowds.

Ruth Reichl, editor of Gourmet magazine, says that in our celebrity-obsessed culture, many of these diners are seeking a personal connection as much as a good meal. “The more people can identify with these chefs, the more they want to go to their places, buy their books, have some kind of contact with them,” Reichl says.

Linda Carucci, curator of food arts at COPIA, the American Center for Food, Wine and the Arts in California’s Napa Valley, says the rise of celebrity chefs has made people more aware of the foods they put into their bodies. It’s also helped draw more men to her cooking classes — and, she says, they talk about their favorite chefs the way other guys might talk about football stars.

“They’re rabid about it,” Carucci says. “I mean, they talk about them like they’re on a first-name basis.”

Please visit www.npr.org to listen to the entire story.

# # #

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.
Read more »

Emeril Keeps It Real — at home the superstar chef indulges a passion for wine(cover story)
by Harvey Steiman

Emeril Lagasse hunches over a frying pan in his home kitchen, a pose familiar to anyone who has seen him on television. Chattling amiably with a visitor, he lifts four halibut fillets from a thin film of olive oil in the pan, turns gracefully and transfers them to plates, carefully spoons on a delicately flavored relish of corn, tomatoes and cucumbers. Not exactly what you might expect from a man who rouses his TV audiences with the mantra, “Pork fat rules!”

For the full story, please read the August 31, 2004 edition of Wine Spectator magazine