Emeril's Restaurant heats up New Orleans' warehouse district

Emeril's Restaurant heats up New Orleans' warehouse district heats up New Orleans' warehouse district

NEW ORLEANS - Emeril's Restaurant, the black-iron-and-brick-themed creation of former Commander's Palace chef Emeril Lagasse, is forging a link between industrial ambience and Creole-American cuisine on the backbone of this city's awakening warehouse district.

Located in a redeveloping factory strip just west of the New Orleans Convention Center, the moderately priced restaurant showcases Lagasse's flair for cottage-raised meats and produce and house-made cheeses and sausage.

Thirty-three-year-old Lagasse, the chef who followed Paul Prudhomme into the top kitchen spot at Commander's Palace in 1983, introduced a lighter style of Creole cooking there - a style he intends to continue refining at Emeril's.

A sampling of Lagasse's dishes includes home-made goat cheesee and spinach in filo dough ($3.75), grilled andouille sausage with home-made Worcestershire sauce ($4.50), saute of Louisiana crawfish over jambalaya cakes ($13.75), roast quail with wild mushroom stuffing and andouille dressing ($16.50) and Emeril's chocolate souffle with Grand Marnier sauce, ($6.00).

Lunch entrees begin at $7.95; dinner entrees, at $12. Also, the cocktail bar offers entree tastings in the $5-to-$8 price range. Predicting dinner covers in the 150-to-200 range, he expects Emeril's checks to average in the low to mid-$20s.

A dozen exclusive California wines, reasonably priced, start at $14 a bottle. No draft beers and no soft-drink dispensers are seen at the cocktail bar, which is backed by a 14-foot-high wine rack complete with library ladder for retrieving bottles.

"We're doing quality bottled beverages and cocktails, which are made from scratch like in the old days," Lagasse said. "There's great value in it."

Emeril's opened March 26, a Monday, with no fanfare. However, the reservation book filled rapidly. "Not overly loud but very festive," Emeril said of the mood on his official opening.

The building that houses the restaurant, a historic structure, was the Mackie Grocery Warehouse. It formerly supplied the river district where smoke-stacked stern-wheelers once paddled. Art galleries along Julia Street give the area a token Bohemian flair.

Although the warehouse neighborhood doesn't yet boast sidewalk traffic, Emeril's - the only restaurant for several blocks - is just a five-minute walk from the 1,600-room New Orleans Hilton Riverside & Towers rising at the end of Poydras street downtown. Lagasse, who describes the neighborhood as "developing but not quite developed," provides valet parking for patrons.

The decor is "very predictable - concrete and steel, oak and pine - a lot like Emeril's mood," said Tari Lagasse, wife of the chef. It was she who designed the 130-seat restaurant with a local architect to fit the cobblestoned personality of the corner where Julia Street meets Tchoupitoulas near the Mississippi River.

"Food writers will say it's interesting," added Tari Lagasse, a former fashion person who admitted she doesn't want to be far from Emeril when she's running the dining room.

The Lagasses brought in pine flooring from another warehouse and had it remilled for Emeril's. A massive sprinkler system valve decorates one of the outside brick walls; an old piece of slate hangs on the other.

A dramatic interior wall, drilled with holes the size of wine bottle tops, invites Emeril's wine-drinking patrons to leave their corks at the restaurant.

An innovation is the seven-stool "singles" food bar that looks into the tight, efficient Lagasse kitchen - deliberately targeting customers who forget to make reservations but don't want to dine at the cocktail bar.

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