Blue-Collar Gourmet

EMERIL LAGASSE DOESN'T EVEN TRY to make his name sound French. He pronounces it La-GASSY. On ""Emeril Live,'' his daily program on the TV Food Network, the 39-year-old restau- rateur exudes regular-American charm: ""Y'know, this is like a real cookin' show. We got food here!'' Slam-dunking ingredients into the pot, he explodes with aggressive, athletic catch phrases. ""Bam!'' he shouts. ""Let's kick it up a notch!'' The men in the studio audience cheer, ""Hey now!'' The women swoon. Forget the cooking show. Give this guy his own sitcom.

The democratization of haute cuisine has taken many forms. Foodies have replaced gourmets. You can buy porcini mushrooms at the supermarket. In-flight meals are occasionally edible. Now along comes this blue-ribbon chef with the blue-collar moxie of a short-order cook. The old-school TV chefs of the '70s were perfectionist doyennes (Julia Child) or wine-guzzling bons vivants (the galloping Graham Kerr), followed in the '80s by the cook as control freak in the form of the Frugal Gourmet and Martha Stewart. Lagasse is none of the above. ""He is much more to do with Elan than EtouffE,'' says Erika Gruen, president of the all-food-all-the-time cable network.

""Essence of Emeril'' started in 1993 and quickly became the food channel's top-rated kitchen. A couple of specials built around Lagasse's cookbook, ""Louisiana Real & Rustic,'' led to the nightly ""Live'' show, with its studio audience and minor-celebrity guests (Harvey Fierstein, Deborah Norville). Fans of the ""ragin' Cajun'' come to tapings in T shirts that say BAM! even though, according to Lagasse's informal polling, half of them never cook.

""I'm having a blast!'' Lagasse says. On his lunch break between tapings at the New York studio for ""Emeril Live,'' he mellows a little in his black jeans, clogs and a white T shirt from his flagship restaurant, Emeril's. (He also owns NOLA, in New Orleans, and Emeril's New Orleans Fish House in Las Vegas.) He proudly shows off the script for the show: blank page after blank page. ""I just come in and--bam!--do my thing,'' he says. His ""thing'' could be a double-cut pork chop with tamarind-glazed roasted sweet potatoes and green-chile mole sauce, or 10-layer banana-cream pie the size of a throw pillow. His ""kick it up a notch'' credo means, essentially, more. Of everything. More flavor, more ingredients. ""America got so wrapped up with healthy, healthy, healthy,'' he laments, ""they forgot what eating was like.''

But Lagasse didn't. He was raised in Fall River, Mass.; his father was a French-Canadian textile worker, and his mother loved to cook. He wound up in New Orleans because ""people in Louisiana live to eat, they don't eat to live.'' Luckily for him, the rest of the country lives to watch TV.

© 1997