I attended culinary school in 2004 — a time when everyone had started talking about restaurants and taking pictures of their food. It was just as the celebrity chef phenomenon took off, and one of the first class discussions we had as a cohort of students was to tell everyone the reason we’d enrolled in culinary school. The majority of the students had the same response: “I want to be like Emeril [Lagasse].”
While I was discussing the man who made so many of my classmates want to become chefs, Emeril Lagasse’s son, E.J. Lagasse was just a baby. The now 20 year old, who has since become a chef himself, says he thought growing up alongside his famous father was “totally normal.”
“People would come up to us on the street and take photos or ask for an autograph,” he tells Yahoo Life. “It wasn’t until I was 7 or 8 years old that I realized that the same things didn’t happen to my friends’ dads.”