Emeril Lagasse feasts globally
6-part series airs on Amazon
Associated Press
Caution: Eat before you watch “Eat the World.” Do not come to this new Emeril Lagassehosted docuseries hungry for anything other than new insights about food, travel and culture.
And if you must snack while viewing any of these six half-hours (all available for streaming on Amazon Prime), be careful what you choose. Reheating a slice from your pizzeria may plunge you into comparative despair as you behold Lagasse’s odyssey to Italy, where he savors what reputedly is the best pizza in the world, lovingly prepared with dough, olives, tomatoes, mozzarella and anchovies all collected just a few miles from the village where this tiny restaurant draws patrons by the hundreds. For him, it’s ecstasy with every bite, and you, in your deprivation, will understand all too painfully why.
For this and each “Eat the World” expedition, Lagasse travels with a fellow superstar chef who serves as his liaison to locales, cooking techniques and flavors with which he may be no more conversant than the viewer.
“Maybe this experience, maybe this place isn’t familiar to me,” says Lagasse, “but always there’s a story and there’s pieces of knowledge, and that’s what I’m trying to deliver for the folks at home, along with an adventure.”
The adventure shared with Mario Batali takes them to China.
“We started in New York with ravioli, and we ended up in Shanghai,” he reports. “People might scratch their heads at home and wonder, ‘Why not Italy?’ It’s because we were looking for the beginning of the noodle!”
Other countries that Lagasse and a fellow culinarian will sample include Cuba, Spain, Korea and Sweden, where he joins Marcus Samuelsson at a restaurant whose Michelin-star chef thrills diners from a kitchen that has no electricity — “everything he does is by wood, fire and smoke!”
At 56, Lagasse has enjoyed decades of fame as a restaurateur and celeb-