It’s the voice you notice first. What is it? The tone between a croon and a growl, with more resonance and authority than you expect from the boyish face in front of you. The accent, well…it’s like one of those optical illusions that flickers from one thing to another, depending on the light. Words roll around in there like pinballs, careering, often in the course of one sentence, from Mississippi to Mayfair, the smooth edges of the Upper East Side to the boggy drawl of the Florida Panhandle, pinging off Stockholm, and then tumbling into the crunch of immigrant vowels that connect the mills and docklands of New Orleans to the mills and docklands of the Northeast. In short, a vocal map of points likely connected nowhere on earth other than in the person from whose mouth the remarkable sound is issuing.

“It’s different, that’s for sure,” says his own mother, after laughing for a long time.

There are a lot of things that are different, even unique, about E.J. Lagasse, who, last fall, at the age of 22, became the youngest chef to claim two Michelin stars for their restaurant in the century-long history of the guide’s rating system. But to start with the obvious way in which he is not strictly unique: E.J. Lagasse is more properly Emeril John Lagasse IV. His father is Emeril John Lagasse III, which is to say: Emeril!

At one point, and perhaps still, the most famous chef in America, Emeril III was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, and came to New Orleans in 1982 to take over the kitchen at Commander’s Palace from the legendary Paul Prudhomme. There, he began the invention of a boisterous, modernized Creole cuisine, a “New New Orleans Cooking,” as he titled his first cookbook. In 1990, he struck out on his own, opening Emeril’s in the rundown Warehouse District. But it was on television that Emeril became a household name, all but singlehandedly inventing the celebrity chef in the process. His catchphrases (“Bam!” “Kick it up a notch!”) were ubiquitous. He hosted a five-days-a-week cooking and talk show, Emeril Live, and even starred, albeit briefly, in an NBC sitcom that bore his name. His influence was felt everywhere from Anthony Bourdain to Guy Fieri, from hipster pork buns to the Jack Daniel’s glazed steak at TGI Fridays. Meanwhile, Emeril’s the restaurant, which was always a more serious restaurant than its namesake’s other projects might have led you to believe, aged into an institution. It was perhaps a bit of a time capsule of Lagasse’s heyday—serving such baroque flavor bombs as a tamarind-glazed double-cut pork chop with green mole atop caramelized sweet potatoes—but, like a loud, slightly tacky uncle, it was always nice to know the restaurant was there.

Four years ago, E.J. Lagasse returned home to New Orleans, where he had spent part of his childhood, with the intention of completely reinventing Emeril’s. He had spent the past several years in some of the most rarefied kitchens of New York and Europe, and that was his vision for his father’s restaurant: Instead of boisterous, Emeril’s would be refined. Instead of double-cut pork chops, it would offer a modern luxury tasting menu at modern luxury prices. Instead of as many as 350 diners per night, it would serve fewer than a quarter of that number. The result would resemble the kind of restaurants that receive stars from Michelin, which was rumored to be expanding its guide, for the first time, to New Orleans. And instead of Emeril Lagasse III, the face of the new Emeril’s would be Emeril Lagasse IV. He was 19 years old.

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Now that the transformed Emeril’s has been included at number 30 on North America’s 50 Best Restaurants; now that Relais & Châteaux has welcomed it into its fold and Michelin has handed down its stars; now that E.J. has been named a finalist for a James Beard Award and The New York Times has proclaimed his restaurant “utterly charming,” bestowing three stars of its own; and now that the reservation book is perpetually packed solid, with hundreds on the waiting list each night…. Now, everybody likes to pretend all of this was a perfectly normal idea all along.

It was not a normal idea. In fact, it was completely cuckoo. Whatever else old Emeril’s was, it was full—of conventioneers and locals alike. New Orleans, for all its culinary majesty, has never quite taken to modernity, much less fancy ideas from so-called more sophisticated cities. To hand the keys over to a teenager with outlandish notions seemed at best risky, at worst like indulging the hubristic vanity project of a nepo baby. That his restaurant is instead, by any measure, a triumph is another testament to the deceptively odd young man at its center.