R&I's 2004 Executive of the Year: Emeril Lagasse
Emeril Lagasse shows that chefs can be brands and that 21st century foodservice businesses can operate in multiple channels.
By Scott Hume, Executive Managing Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 6/15/2004
Emeril Lagasse most often is seen as the exuberant
showman-chef whose “Emeril Live!” airs twice daily
on Food Network. His “Bam!” “Happy, happy”
and “Food of love” catchphrases punctuate conversations
even of people who may never cook a meal or watch his programs.
Others know of his cookbooks (by mid-2003, 3.5 million copies had been sold) or his licensed products (from cutlery to cookware, pasta sauces to his Emeril’s Essence spice mixture) or have dined at one of his nine restaurants.
Yet Emeril Lagasse’s business card identifies him not as television star, author, food manufacturer or restaurateur. He is president of Emeril’s Homebase, the multichannel New Orleans-based company that oversees all his ventures except television production. Take or leave his over-the-top television persona and the rich cuisine he favors, but recognize that in 14 years the 44-year-old Emeril has gone from struggling to secure financing for his first restaurant (Emeril’s Restaurant in New Orleans) to being arguably the best-known chef-restaurateur in America, redefining, elevating and humanizing perceptions of what it is to be a foodservice professional.
That executive chefs no longer are anonymous and dining rooms are designed to afford a view of the chef in action in the kitchen are due in some measure to the impact Emeril has had. So, too, is the plethora of kitchen merchandise bearing other chefs’ names. Recognizing that influence and the scope and success of the organization he has built, the editors of Restaurants & Institutions name Emeril Lagasse the 2004 Executive of the Year.
Deep Roots
When traveling, Emeril is in contact with Homebase every day—sometimes
several times a day—and he wants updates not just on financials
but also on menu mix for the nine operations (which had revenues
of approximately $95 million in 2003). If an operation isn’t
performing to expectations, he’s likely to visit, overseeing
food and service from the place he feels most comfortable: the
kitchen.
“I’m very involved with every aspect of whatever we do,” says Emeril. “I’m hands-on but I also try to be respectful of giving people a challenge. They know my expectations, and the organization’s, but you also have to let people be creative. You give them [space], but at the same time there’s a mission, and a sense of who we are and where we’re going.”
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Away from cameras, Emeril is disarmingly soft-spoken and serious, though there are flashes of the impish humor he exudes in public. Not surprisingly, he feels most deeply connected to his first restaurant, Emeril’s in New Orleans (which his father opened each morning until a recent illness). He is a man for whom the notion of “roots” is a strong influence, as evidenced by the frequent reminiscences of growing up in Fall River, Mass., he injects in his television shows. But the roots of his adult life are in his adopted home of New Orleans, and most firmly planted in Emeril’s. It is where he refined his signature “New New Orleans” cuisine and, perhaps equally importantly, where he feels he paid the professional dues through years of hard work that now help him ignore his critics.
In 1982, his work troubleshooting F&B operations in the Northeast for Dunfey Hotels (now Omni International) caught the attention of a vacationing headhunter, who recommended Emeril to Dick and Ella Brennan in New Orleans. Paul Prudhomme was leaving Commander’s Palace and the Brennans, searching for a new executive chef, already had rejected a number of prospects.
Ella Brennan says the then-22-year-old Emeril was a tough sell at first. “I told [the recruiter] I didn’t want anyone so young. But he was very persistent and said, ‘You’ve got to meet him. I’m sending him down.’ Well, we met him and it couldn’t have been more than 20 minutes before Dick said, ‘I think this is our guy.’ And I agreed,” she says. “He talked about food with passion, energy, knowledge, everything that makes for success.”
Shifting the Learning Curve
He stayed at Commander’s for seven and a half years, serving
the last two as general manager as well as executive chef. “Everybody
has to have models,” says Emeril. “The magical time
in my professional life was taking over leadership at Commander’s
and working with people as dynamic as Ella and Dick.
“Obviously I had good cooking skills, a good palate when it came to food and wine. But what happened there was a growing experience, running a restaurant and seeing what it takes, whether it’s marketing, publicity, running the day-to-day show, mentoring and leading people, tasting the turtle soup or making the wine list. That’s when the whole learning curve started changing for me as a business person.”
When he decided it was time to strike out on his own, Emeril and Ella Brennan at first planned to jointly open a restaurant, he recalls. “But she wanted to open in the French Quarter because of the [upscale] demographics. I wanted to pioneer this new area called the Warehouse District. It was pretty bad; it didn’t even have streetlights.”
Getting financial backing was difficult because Emeril had a solid reputation as a chef “but as far as equity, all I really had was myself. My confidence. My drive.” Finally Whitney Bank (“the most conservative financial institution in the state,” he says) took a chance on him and in 1989, creation of Emeril’s Restaurant in the tough Warehouse District got underway.
Up On the Roof
What he is most proud of, Emeril says, is that the team he brought
together to make Emeril’s happen still is together and forms
the nucleus of Emeril’s Homebase. Long-time friend Eric
Linquest is executive vice president, overseeing “the hardcore
mechanics of the restaurant division,” says Emeril. Tony
Cruz, whom Emeril knew from a New Orleans bakery and recruited
to help with the financial aspects of opening a restaurant, still
oversees all finances. Director of Marketing Marti Dalton has
worked with him for 16 years. Bernard Carmouche and David McCelvey,
Homebase director and associate director of culinary respectively,
who test every recipe for his television shows, have been at his
side from the start.
“Everything that had to be done [to the space] we did, because I didn’t have any money [to pay someone else to do it],” he says. “I couldn’t have a CPA firm run a business analysis or have someone write the wine list. We had a tiny office two blocks away in another warehouse. I would work all day and then at night I’d have merchants come and taste products. I tasted all the wines and decided what would be right with the food.”
Hiring and training that first 33-person staff influenced all that has followed, especially what he calls “Emerilizing” new restaurant employees. “I remember that two weeks [before the planned opening of Emeril’s], the space wasn’t ready and the landlord gave me the roof across the street,” he says. “The whole staff would go up there and we’d talk about the menu, the wine list, everything. And, you know, we still do that at every pre-meal in every restaurant,” he says. “We talk about food, wine, guests, service. And when the curtain’s up, it’s show time and we go at it. We try a little harder than we did the day before and that’s the overall philosophy.”
Now, Emeril’s Homebase takes up most of a three-story building in New Orleans and has 1,400 employees (excluding television production). “It’s like a Fort Knox of food,” he says proudly. “To see it evolve from a $200-a-month office where I worked, and Eric and Tony and Marti worked—and we stored wine—is really something.”
The Big Uneasy
A second New Orleans restaurant, Nola, opened in 1992, and he
began taping shows for the fledging Food Network the following
year. In 1995 he was one of the first chefs to gamble on Las Vegas,
opening Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House in the MGM Grand.
Taping shows in New York City and getting the Fish House in gear in New Orleans stretched Emeril thin, and he quickly reined in the burgeoning operation to avoid losing control or compromising the quality of any endeavor. He had his core group of trusted executives, but not enough bench strength to support so rapid an expansion.
“What I learned was that if we were going to continue to grow, we had to reorganize our infrastructure,” he says. “I called a management summit because we got to a point where I said, ‘Where are we, where do we want to go and how are we going to get there? Here’s the agenda: We’re going to go away and sit in a room and rip our organization apart. We’re going to critique ourselves, our restaurants, our partners and our licensees and we’re going to set goals in every area. How are we going to get better as an organization?’”
The results were more-formalized systems for internal development of management talent (in kitchens and dining rooms), better human-resources programs to improve benefits, improved training manuals and addition of 40 Homebase employees to write television shows, test recipes and evaluate restaurants. It was three years before he opened another restaurant (in 1998).
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The commitment to internal development of managers explains, he says, why he hasn’t opened more restaurants. Last year his company turned down as many as 300 restaurant proposals, he says. If he were seeking to blanket the country with a chain of restaurants, he easily could do that. But they opened only three—the most in any one year—because the opportunities and people were right. “It’s about quality, not quantity,” he says. “When you run multiple restaurants, you have to rely on great people. Great people, great food and great service make profits, hopefully.”
Each restaurant has an executive chef to whom four sous chefs and a pastry chef report. A general manager’s team includes four assistant managers and a sommelier.
True to the Brand
One key to the operation’s success is that “we’re
great listeners. We’re so connected to customers that it’s
unbelievable. I stopped cooking for restaurant critics a long
time ago, because they can make you crazy and make life difficult.”
Emeril protects his brand by carefully considering customer expectations
in determining both menu and décor. A “foundation
menu” at each restaurant includes customer favorites such
as a double-cut pork chop and rack of lamb with Creole mustard
sauce. The other half of the menu is created at the discretion
of the executive chef, using what is fresh and seasonal.
Before Emeril’s Atlanta opened last year, it was suggested that the 20-ounce pork chop might be too large for local tastes and that a 14- or 15-ounce chop at a lower price might sell better. “I said, ‘I think we’ll confuse the customer if we do that,’” he recalls. “If a customer has been to another Emeril’s and orders the pork chop, they obviously know what they’re going to get. If it comes out 5 ounces smaller, they’re going to feel ripped off. I said, ‘If you want to say, let’s cut back the chops across the board to 15 ounces, I’ll listen to that, but I’m not necessarily going to agree.” The double chop is 20 ounces in Atlanta and is a top seller.
The restaurants prepare many foods from scratch—including andouille and chorizo sausages—because “I don’t know any other way to do it,” he says. “As much as I want to say I have a new-school approach, I’m still very old school when it comes to controlling as much as possible on the plate.”
There are no low-carb sections on Emeril’s menus. Instead, he says he tries to provide balance and something for everyone, including vegetarians. His cooking is lighter than it was a decade ago, but he says the principles remain the same: “freshness, quality, simplicity, not masking flavors, not having too many components on the plate.”
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His approach to design and décor are similar: bold yet simple. He works primarily with David Rockwell and David Mexico of New York City-based Rockwell Group for interior design (they are preparing a major remodeling of the Fish House in Las Vegas). Emeril says he won’t approve the choice of a chair until he has sat on it over a period of days. He doesn’t like dim lighting (“People should look and feel good in a restaurant.”) and says he learned to pay attention to acoustics when the original Emeril’s décor made it hard for guests to talk and be heard (the restaurant since has received a Rockwell redesign).
As with all else, his approach to design is guided by two basic questions: Is it what people want? Is it true to the Emeril’s brand? He rejected designers’ initial suggestion that one area of Emeril’s Atlanta be an antipasto bar. “I said, ‘What message are we sending if people come to Emeril’s for New Orleans food and we’ve got an antipasto bar?’ ” he says. The next suggestion, that it be a seafood bar, also fell short. It works in Las Vegas at the Fish House, but wasn’t right for Atlanta. The section became a wine-decanting station.
Man on a Mission
Emeril’s move into television earned him barbs from other
chefs and restaurateurs as well as media critics. In an especially
acerbic Nov. 4, 1998, review of “Emeril Live!” in
The New York Times, Amanda Hesser dismissed him as “more
jester than cook,” complaining that he “often dumbs
recipes down so much that he removes all the intellectual effort
that goes into creating subtle flavors in a dish.”
Such criticisms have stung, he admits, especially because his intention was to help foodservice and entertain viewers rather than be a straight-up cookbook-style recipe provider (most of his recipes, with ingredient measurements, are posted on Food Network’s Web site). “The first two shows [on Food Network] were flops. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Then ‘Essence of Emeril’ came about, about eight years ago,” he says. “My mission wasn’t money. I got maybe $50 a show. The mission was if I could reach one person a day and get them a little excited about our industry, more excited about cooking or about wine, then I would continue to do television.
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“Toward the fifth or sixth season of ‘Essence’ I started feeling it. When construction workers are yelling, ‘Hey, Emeril!’ I knew something was happening.”
Educating and mentoring home cooks is the mission of his foray into packaged spices and sauces. His latest venture is a line of Emeril’s fresh lettuces and herbs, which may be followed by heirloom tomatoes, garlic or shallots. “We’re just having some fun with it,” he says. “It’s that connection with the soil. We’re trying to come up with new packaging for quality lettuce and herbs to last a little longer. I don’t know if it’ll make money. I don’t care. It’s a challenge.”
If critics carp that he’s overexposed or a sellout, let them, he says. His fans, customers and heart say he’s doing just fine.
“I’m comfortable with myself. I’m not trying to be anyone I’m not. All I want to be is Emeril,” he says. “I don’t like small thinkers. If you think big, you’re going to be big. If you think small, that’s exactly what you’re going to be. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but move over ’cause I’m coming through.”
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Fried Louisiana oysters with spinach, shaved fennel
and onion, crispy bacon and creamy anise-flavored
dressing (Emeril’s Atlanta) 
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