accessAtlanta

[This review was originally published on Thursday, 10/23/2003]

JOEY IVANSCO/Staff (ENLARGE)
The glassed-in wine tower is typical of the spare-no-expense approach at Emeril's Atlanta, which has a staff of 160 to orchestrate meals that easily can total $75 a head.
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Who's having an early-bird dinner at Emeril's at 5:30 on Monday? Well, who isn't?

There is — for starters — a jewel-encrusted lady in a glittering black-and-white sequined tunic who looks for all the world like a late-model Liz Taylor with supercharged hair. Nearby, a mod couple engage in a kind of foreplay across the table. Three fat cats drink expensive wine from balloon stemware as a floor manager schmoozes on the sidelines.

Above it all, a wine steward high up a ladder retrieves a bottle from the tippy-top of the wine tower — Cirque du Sommelier.

And then there's me, scrutinizing the food a bit more than my fellow diners.

But I'm perplexed. This is my third dinner at Emeril's. I've eaten my way through most of the menu, and a creeping ick factor has shanghaied every meal. I mean, the excitement in this room is palpable. The decor is too totally wowie zowie for words. And yet the food strikes me as clumsily executed, behind the times and, frankly, not worth the very high price tag.

May I quickly recount the phenom? Emeril Lagasse — the chef, Food Network personality, cookbook author, former sitcom star and one-man catchphrase generator — has recently opened the fourth branch of his namesake restaurant. Emeril's Atlanta follows the New Orleans flagship and branches in Orlando and Las Vegas, and Emeril's Miami will soon debut. The concept apparently flourishes in Sun Belt cities that support large convention and tourist trades and where the chef's name recognition can play to a crowd.

Emeril's is no mere cookie-cutter chain, but rather an ambitious high-end restaurant. The glassed-in wine tower is only one detail of a design that spared no expense. Serpentine stairs lead up to a dining room framed over the exhibition kitchen. Chandeliers look like a fantasy created from vials in an alchemist's shop. And sinuous panels of woven wood cleverly soften the monumental walls in this vast lobby space of a new Buckhead office tower.

The restaurant maintains a top-notch wine program and employs a staff of 160 to orchestrate meals that easily fetch $75 a head. The kitchen buys premium ingredients and fashions New Orleans-inflected modern American food (a gumbo-to-foie-gras spectrum). It boasts an on-site bread bakery and butcher shop. The chef even cures his own cold cuts for the antipasto plate.

But this restaurant's cooking failures make the strongest impression. It isn't that the calamari are merely rubbery and greasy, it's that they're rubbery and greasy and coated with so much Kentucky-fried seasoning salt that your socks practically roll off your swelling ankles of their own volition. It's that they turn soggy in their smoked tomato sauce and that they're topped with a yet-saltier surfeit of stuffed green olives and parmesan cheese. That's the problem.

The famous double-cut pork chop is a dispiriting grey monument to saw through, and its oily, broken green chile mole doesn't help. Curled little barbecued shrimp set on an oversized plate spattered with a taupe-hued cream sauce seem so 10 years ago.

OK.

After three meals, I stare at my computer screen like Carrie Bradshaw, with unanswered questions looking back.

Do other people actually like this restaurant? My various guests, no. The people waiting in the valet parking line, more or less.

Am I an insufferable food snob? Maybe.

But the most bothersome question was this: Do I need to rethink what I consider the central tenet of restaurant reviewing — that the food should speak for itself?

Or: Does the context of dining matter as much as the taste of the food?

Having never before eaten at an Emeril Lagasse restaurant, there was only one way to find out. Go to New Orleans. I called the mother ship for a reservation. And a few nights later, there I was.

Emeril's in New Orleans is a salmon-colored corner building in the city's Warehouse/Arts District. When Emeril's opened in 1990, the area was all but deserted at night; the restaurant's popularity pioneered its transformation into the present SoHo-esque neighborhood of galleries, lofts and boutique hotels.

We got our corner table in the bar, cracked open the menus and immediately recognized about the half the dishes from Atlanta. With some trepidation, I ordered the calamari. Guess what? It was hard to stop eating. Tender. Not salty. Ringed by a thin mote of smoked tomato sauce that left you wanting more. Topped with pitted nicoise olives that echoed the sweetness of the calamari and just enough green olive to suggest a muffuletta.

In fact, I ordered one for one, apples for apples, down the list. Here's a comparison:

Atlanta pork chop: Soft, grey, mealy texture, awash in oily sauce.

New Orleans pork chop: Char-glazed, crisp-edged, coated with sauce.

Atlanta rib-eye: Wet and limp texture, inedibly salty, served with potatoes.

New Orleans rib-eye: Seared and juicy, offset by a tasty shallot-foie gras compound butter and a welcome hint of smoky bacon.

Atlanta barbecue shrimp: Good shrimp, tasty sauce, unappetizing presentation.

New Orleans barbecue shrimp: Fabulous shrimp, same tasty sauce, same unappetizing presentation.

The meal in New Orleans was a league apart from those in Atlanta, if not a complete success. The gumbo was too salty; the desserts clumsy. But all in all it had an easygoing appeal, helped by a fabulous bottle of Domaine Tempier Bandol. When I got back ?

I could see that the Atlanta kitchen suffers primarily from execution problems. It goes way overboard on seasoning. It doesn't keep its grill hot enough. It doesn't watch the oil temperature in the deep fryer. All fixable.

And, yet, what to make of burned crab cakes with their gluey/bready texture and bits of sweet pepper that taste so much like yesteryear's deviled crab?

Wild mushroom risotto stuffed into a portobello cap is a sticky and submissive business with a mote of watery "mushroom jus" that lends only its gray pallor. Banana cream pie has pockets of solid custard that separate from the fruit like pieces of a three-dimensional puzzle.

The many nightly specials, sadly, don't exactly kick it up a notch. A salad special involves arugula, dessert-worthy peach puree, blue cheese toasts and a round of pancetta bacon that had been cooked in advance and left to harden. A slice of foie gras is scored like a checkerboard, preventing the surface from crisping and leaving only an impression of the connective tissue.

If you are aware of the kitchen's excesses and order well, you can fashion a meal that offers, if not a gourmet benchmark, at least a kind of pop-foodie fun. A fat wedge of lobster cheesecake isn't lobstery, but it's creamy and rich with chunks of tender meat. The seafood gumbo is far less resonant than the version at Pappadeaux but truer than most around town. A leg of house-cured duck confit over a hash of roasted duck with gorgeously caramelized cubes of roasted sweet potato makes lusty sense. Chocolate souffle? Does the trick.

So let's look at context again. In New Orleans, you have a corner restaurant in a funky neighborhood that became a sensation and continues serving the excessive, yummy, feel-good food that made it famous. In Atlanta, you have a shiny new food palace in a city that likes high-gloss dining. But you also have a kitchen that can't yet communicate the goofy charm of the menu it inherited.

If you judge this restaurant solely by its food, as I do, you'll conclude it's a bam shame. But if you've ever emeriled in New Orleans, you'll know there's potential.

Overall rating: Fair

Food: New Orleans-inflected modern American cooking that too often suffers from poor execution.

Service: Friendly and good-humored, considering the opening crush of customers.

Setting: Vast and stimulating, with a surfeit of style that some will find vulgar and others will see as just the ticket for big-city fun.

Address, telephone: 3500 Lenox Road N.W., 404-564-5600

Hours: Lunch: 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. daily; dinner: 5:30-10 p.m. Sundays-Thursdays, 5:30-11 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays

Price range: Lunch entrees $15-$21; dinner appetizers $6-$12; dinner entrees $21-$30

Credit cards: All major cards accepted

Recommended dishes: Lobster cheesecake, gumbo of the day, duck confit over duck-sweet potato hash

Vegetarian choices: Yes

Wine list: Broad and savvy; instantly ranks as one of the city's most promising

Full bar or wine/beer: Full bar

Reservations: Mandatory unless you're willing to walk in very early or very late

Children: Fine for older kids

Parking: Valet

Wheelchair access: Full

Smoking policy: In the bar area only

Noise level: Very lively but not miserably loud

Patio: Yes, and it's well protected from the Ga. 400 fumes by a high wall.

Takeout: No