Few chefs can claim they’ve shared the kinds of experiences Josh Adamo has had in the culinary scene — and he’s still only 29 years old.
Born and raised in Sault Ste. Marie, the Sault College culinary grad has worked in some of the finest restaurants around the globe while establishing a number of elite connections along the way.
One of those connections — EJ Lagasse, the son of celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse — landed Adamo a job at their family’s reinvigorated and famous restaurant called Emeril's in New Orleans around this time last year.
He’s been the head chef there ever since.
“Meeting Emeril was crazy for me,” Adamo told SooToday. “I used to watch him on TV with my mom as a kid. Now, he’s just Emeril — he’ll send me videos on Facebook, come in and eat, I get to text him and call him. It’s really cool.”
But his current success didn't happen overnight, or how Emeril may describe it: "Bam!" as he so famously adopted as a catchphrase on the Food Network.
While he’s reaping the rewards from years of hard work, Adamo’s path to the most formidable kitchens didn’t even begin as a culinary student.
In fact, his skills in the kitchen can be traced back to his earliest days — a story that will likely sound familiar for thousands of Saultites spanning several generations.
Growing up in an Italian household, the future chef was surrounded by the cultural tastes, smells and homegrown specialties of family meals. Learning the cooking basics as a young boy, from pastas to pizzas and everything in between, Adamo discovered his lifelong passion within the walls of his own home.
Eventually, it became difficult to get him out of the kitchen.
“All my grandparents were really good at cooking — so was my mom, and my dad cooked too,” he said. “When I was young, I was always more comfortable in the kitchen. Even in elementary school, you could ask any of my friends, I really liked to cook. It was always something I was super interested in.”
By the age of 16, Adamo, a St. Mary’s College student, was working at Solo Trattoria (now Peace Restaurant) on Queen Street for his co-op placement in the mornings.
The next year, Solo owner Chris Lepore offered him a job. Adamo’s Grade 12 schedule consisted of going to school and then heading straight to work until 11 p.m.
“I learned a lot there,” he said. “I was making salads and pizzas, washing and prepping vegetables. Most of all, I learned how much of a hard worker Chris was. Because I was young and saw how hard he was working, it kind of steered me away from it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do this.”
Eventually, Adamo decided to enroll in the one-year culinary program at Sault College while he continued to work at Solo.
Once he finished the program, the college grad was ready to take his talents to Toronto.
“I wanted to see what the restaurant scene was like over there and really push myself,” he said.
Shortly after moving down, Adamo got hired at Auberge du Pommier in 2015 — a well-known, fine dining French restaurant just north of the city.
That’s when the intensity started to ramp up.
“It was such a beautiful restaurant, I was just so drawn to that life and style of cooking,” he said. “But working in Toronto was difficult. The level of discipline and responsibility put on the cooks was so foreign to me. More competition, better cooks, sharper knives — every aspect of it.”
“I was learning a lot, but I was getting my ass kicked at the same time,” he added.
During his nearly three-year experience down south, Adamo participated in a pair of big competitions that included a regional challenge called the Hawksworth, which he placed first in, as well as a national contest he lost.
But the one he lost ended up being a ticket to his next journey overseas.
“I started getting more attention and connected with people in Toronto and Canada,” he said. “I didn’t win the national competition, but I did well. The prize was an internship at any restaurant in the world you want to go to. One of the chefs said they wanted to give me the internship because they really liked me.”
So, 23-year-old Adamo packed his things, and within a couple of weeks he was interning at The Fat Duck in England — an iconic restaurant outside London that’s rated three Michelin stars, the highest rating a restaurant can receive.
“That was a culture shock,” he admitted. “The skills and discipline I learned in Toronto helped me a lot when I got to England. But obviously the restaurants were way more advanced. It was like going from the OHL to the NHL. It was just faster, cleaner and more efficient.”
After interning at The Fat Duck for one month, Adamo began searching for his next big challenge in London.
Wanting to work for the best of the best, his tireless job search led him to Clare Smyth’s then new restaurant called Core.
“When you step in a kitchen, it needs to give you goosebumps — and this one did,” he said. “They had just opened months before, and I was just obsessed with the level of food they were doing. They offered me the job and I took it.”
Within two weeks of being hired, Adamo was part of a culinary team that travelled to Windsor Castle, where he cooked for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s royal wedding.
No pressure, right?
“That was my welcome to Core,” he said. “Working for that restaurant was the hardest professional experience of my life, but it taught me everything.”
During his time there, Adamo cooked for every A-list celebrity in the United Kingdom one could imagine, from Adele and Ed Sheeran to Gordon Ramsay and David Beckham — all of whom dined there regularly.
“Core was the place to be,” he said. “You couldn’t get a reservation there. It was that place, and it still is.”
“Later on, I got the experience to be Meghan and Harry’s private chef when they came back for the Queen’s Jubilee and the funeral,” he added. “I was with them and got to chat with them a lot. I’d be cooking in the kitchen and their son Archie would come up and try to play with me.”
When 2020 rolled around, Adamo had his eyes set on working in France. But COVID threw a wrench in his initial plans of working at a bakery in the nation’s countryside.
Instead, he paid the bills during those long summer months by working as a private chef for a Russian billionaire in the south of France.
“I was there for four months,” he said. “I cooked lots, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do for long. I wanted to work in a big restaurant.”
By 2021, Adamo found himself back at Core, this time as their sous chef. The restaurant had just earned its third Michelin star when the Sault native returned.
But with France still on his mind, he was hungry for a change.
“I knew that experience as a sous chef was going to propel me to get any job I wanted,” he said. “It was during this time I met Emeril Lagasse’s son EJ while he was doing his internship. He said if I ever wanted to come back to North America to let him know, because there were opportunities with the Emeril group. But I obviously wanted to go to France at the time.”
In January 2023, just one month before heading to France, Adamo was flown down to New Orleans by the Lagasses. They invited him to check out their highly renowned restaurant, which was undergoing major renovations at the time.
Adamo respectfully declined their offer and flew back overseas in February.
He worked at Alain Ducasse’s Le Louis XV in Monaco, another prestigious, three-star Michelin restaurant, until September.
Feeling he wasn’t being challenged enough, Adamo moved back to North America and was hired as the head chef at Emeril’s just in time for its reopening.
Working alongside EJ, who has taken over most of the day-to-day operations from his dad, Adamo says his decision to join their team was among the best he’s ever made.
“It’s just so cool,” he said. “It was Emeril’s first restaurant. It’s been there for 35 years, but the kitchen and dining room are both brand-new. There are so many stories and connections that come with the building.”
“The dishes are all inspired by Louisiana, New Orleans, and of course Emeril Lagasse,” he added. “For example, during crawfish season, we’ll do a crawfish pie. Emeril also had a salmon cheesecake on his menu for a long time, so we have it on ours too — we serve it with caviar.”
Happy to be back on North American soil, Adamo can one day see himself starting his own restaurant or brand, perhaps in the Sault, but maybe elsewhere in Canada.
For now, the young chef is thrilled to continue working with a team of incredibly talented kitchen staff and delivering some of the finest food on the continent — never forgetting his roots.
“My family has been so supportive over the years,” he said. “They have really helped me every step of the way and I couldn’t have done it without them. It’s nice to be in the same time zone as them.”
“Sault College really helped me too,” he added. “I learned a lot at the culinary program there. If anyone is thinking to get there, it’s only going to help. The program in the Sault is great, you can ask lots of questions.”
Readers can follow Adamo’s culinary journey on his Instagram profile by clicking here.
