I dined with Emeril Lagasse at his new NOLA Portuguese restaurant. Here's what I learned.

It was around the middle of a meal of many shared plates that one particular dish really ramped up the reminiscences.

"My mother would make this for me every week when I was growing up," said Emeril Lagasse. "It was just like this."

It was a link of chourico mouro, a blood sausage, cured and poached, plump and gleaming in its casing with pineapple slices framing it on the plate.

"This is how you eat it," Lagasse said, carefully slicing the link the long way, and using a spoon to spread the dark, smooth filling over a torn corner of crusty bread, then laying pineapple over the top before his first bite.

"Oh yeah, baby," the chef said. "This is home."

It was a sentiment Lagasse expressed multiple times through dinner at 34 Restaurant & Bar, which he and his son E.J. Lagasse and their company opened in downtown New Orleans in October.

It is a Portuguese restaurant, one that brings modern style and a refined chef’s eye to the rustic flavors of traditional Portuguese cooking.

Many of the names on the menu and wine list will be unfamiliar to diners who have not explored Portuguese cooking before. But at 34, one of the best-known names in modern cuisine has built an open invitation for a deep dive.

Roots on the table

I joined Lagasse for dinner shortly after 34’s debut as his chefs prepared dishes that tell the restaurant’s story, and also that of its founder.

Lagasse came to fame in New Orleans, where he started as executive chef at Commander’s Palace at age 23, opened his first restaurant, 贰尘别谤颈濒’蝉, in 1990 and built a career that would define the modern celebrity chef and influence successive generations in the kitchen.

But he first stepped to the stove in his family home in Fall River, Massachusetts, an enclave of Portuguese-American life.

His late father Emeril John Lagasse Jr. was a textile worker with French-Canadian roots. His late mother Hilda Medeiros Lagasse, who worked as a curtain maker, was Portuguese, with family ties to the Azores islands.

"My mother ruled the house, so we grew up in a very Portuguese family in a very Portuguese city," Lagasse said.

Traditions anchored his life. He played drums in a 45-member filarmónica band that performed at community events. At home and at church feasts, he ate egg tarts called pasteis de nata, batatas bravas (crispy cubed potatoes with spicy sauce) and bacalhau, salt cod, all of which now have their place on the 34 menu.

What 34 is like

You open the door at 34 to find an enveloping passage that curves around to reveal the bar and dining room. In the lounge, bartenders pour sangria on tap, mix Iberian-inspired cocktails with housemade tonic and serve wine from a list you’ll want to examine closely.

It’s mostly Portuguese or Spanish, with a smattering of South American labels (and none from France or the U.S.). Building it meant making many new connections between producers and distributors. The printed list is like a guide to Iberian wine regions, with maps and detailed explanations.

The dining room is defined by curving booths, dark woods, Portuguese tilework called Azulejos, understated tones and a striking open kitchen with the aroma of smolder scenting the air.

Then there’s the jamón bar, akin to an oyster bar but devoted to fine cured Iberian ham, an obsession shared across Spain and Portugal (where it’s called presunto). Clad in coat and tie, Angel Vazquez, a cortador, or master jamón carver, slices from whole legs with the air of a craftsman at work.

For this meal, though, Lagasse set us up at in a quiet spot in the corner of the dining room. We had a lot to try, and to talk about.

Eating with Emeril

Bread is its own course at 34 and it’s essential, with many dishes inviting sopping and dipping. The in-house bakery is a major part of the kitchen.

"That’s from back home," Lagasse said. "The Portuguese bakeries are so important. It’s all simple, straightforward but there’s so much pride and love in it."

We’d pair that bread with the blood sausage later, but first was a conserva of sardines, part of a galaxy of different tinned fish in fine olive oil, another major obsession of Portuguese food. Spread on the butter. Add a piece of the succulent, darkly-rich fish. Dunk in the tin’s oil. Repeat.

A seemingly simple dish of carrots had an edge of char from the grill, set over a pine nut crema with bursts of citrus. It stoked more memories.

“The first dish I ever cooked was a vegetable soup for my mom, I was 8,” Lagasse said, his eyes drifting from the dish to the window. “We had a vegetable garden in the backyard, just like all the other Portuguese families, and that’s what I used.”

And there it was, the first instance of local sourcing from a chef who would later introduce many to the value of knowing your suppliers.

The crab salad that followed was a delicate arrangement of the fruit of a Louisiana fishery with a subtle curry-spiced sauce, a nod to the historic Portuguese trading routes to India.

Salt cod, preserved for long journeys, comes through seafaring heritage and is foundational to Portuguese cooking. At 34, the bacalhau a bras is an elevated treatment of a comfort food standard, with flakes of the white fish between egg and potato, finished with a crown of exquisite caviar.

Shrimp San Miguel (a play on shrimp Mozambique) has a buttery sauce, warm with paprika, and brings to mind BBQ shrimp, a Louisiana dish Lagasse himself reinvented a generation ago. It called for still more bread, of course.

The porco alentejana, a stew of pork and clams with a chile-infused broth, saw the chef slurping juice from clam shells as if taking shots.

Then came the main act, a rabbit and shrimp paella, part of a whole menu section of shared rice dishes.

The kitchen was specially built around them, to give both smoky charcoal flavor and the very high heat to achieve the right texture, with distinct rice grains rich with rabbit reduction, and the interplay of socarrat, the term for the crispy bits around the edges.

Desserts centered on those pasteis de nata, with a croissant crust cupping a custard filling, and doughnuts, one bursting with a bay leaf cream under a crunchy sugared coating, like the cap of a crème br?lée.

A family project

There are many special aspects of 34. One is a late-night schedule. Another is a DJ station in the dining room that gradually changes the tempo of the music on weekends.

The restaurant is a venture Lagasse has long kept on the back burner, a “someday” project. With the chef’s young son now in the business (E.J. leads the kitchen at the flagship 贰尘别谤颈濒’蝉) the time felt right to make it happen. The name 34 comes from a combination of their names, as Emeril J. Lagasse III (the father) and Emeril J. Lagasse IV (the son).

“I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, it’s very personal to me,” Lagasse said. “I want to do it right, to do my mom proud, to do the people of Fall River proud, and bring something different to our city now.”

34 Restaurant & Bar

714 Baronne St., 504-498-3434

Sun.-Wed., 5:30-10 p.m.; Thu. 5:30 p.m.-1 a.m.; Fri., Sat. 5:30 p.m.-2 a.m.

Happy hour daily 4:30-5:30 p.m.

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