Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House

Back to the Strip pass

The pass asks for repetition before personality. Ken Lum, Chef at Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House in Las Vegas, works that repetition inside a restaurant whose Creole seafood program predates much of the city’s current dining map. His own route back to this kitchen has the shape of a cook’s long arc: Kapiolani Community College first, then Hawaii restaurants, then the slow movement from line cook to sous chef and kitchen leader.

Lum first appeared in the Las Vegas kitchen as a line cook in 1998. By 2007, he had reached Chef de Cuisine at Tidepools at the Grand Hyatt Kauai Resort and Spa in Kauai, Hawaii, a role that asks a cook to think beyond a station and carry the whole service in mind. He later served as executive sous chef at The Club at Kukui’ula in Koloa, Kaua’i, still close to the line but already responsible for the discipline around it. In 2019, he returned to the Fish House as Chef de Cuisine, bringing that Hawaii formation back to a New Orleans seafood room on the Strip.

Creole seafood with a wider pantry

The house opened at the MGM Grand in 1995 as Emeril Lagasse’s first Las Vegas property, built around the New New Orleans cooking that made seafood, Creole structure, and multicultural influence part of the same sentence. The menu keeps that grammar close to the plate: Emeril’s New Orleans Barbecue Shrimp, Miso Glazed Chilean Sea Bass, jambalaya, broiled oysters, crab cakes, deviled eggs, and fish preparations that lean on seasoning, sauce, heat, and rice rather than ornament.

It is modern cooking, but not in the sense of erasing its base. The method here is adaptation: Gulf and Louisiana references carried into a Strip dining room, Creole classics allowed to take on Asian, Portuguese, Southwestern, and other inflections without losing the appetite of the dish. The format gives the kitchen room to move between à la carte service and prix fixe progression. The wine program has also earned outside attention, with the restaurant holding a Wine Spectator tier 2 designation among its 3 current and previous awards.

The room around the work

The room is sea-minded without turning into stage set. Beautiful decor, a conversational noise level, and an elegant atmosphere give the pass enough polish for Las Vegas, while the food keeps returning to the hand: shrimp in sauce, rice carrying spice, fish glazed and cooked to the point where texture matters more than flourish. The restaurant is large, and that scale changes the craft. Consistency becomes part of the method. A plate has to arrive with the same center whether it leaves early in service or deep into a full room.

That is where Lum’s rank matters. Line cook, sous chef, Chef de Cuisine, executive sous chef, then back to Chef de Cuisine here: the sequence reads less like biography than station work extended over a career. If the restaurant has endured, it is partly because the signatures still have to pass through working hands each service. The last measure is not the Strip outside; it is Emeril’s New Orleans Barbecue Shrimp leaving the pass under Ken Lum.