When celebrated chefs arrive at the Naples Winter Wine Festival at the end of the month-the stellar list includes Terrance Brennan, Michelle Bernstein, Traci des Jardins, Hubert Keller, Laurent Tourondel and others from around the country-they will be joined by Emeril Lagasse, who is not a fellow celebrity chef, but rather the most famous chef in the world, and arguably the most influential chef who ever was.

Setting aside for the moment whether that degree of celebrity is a good thing or a bad thing-ever since Lagasse became mega-famous, his own colleagues (not to mention serious foodies, noses in the air) have slagged the man for everything from questionable cooking techniques to cartoonish antics on TV-his fame and influence have allowed Lagasse not only to make money (his company generates revenues of up to $200 million, company executives say), but also to raise money for good causes.

Bill Shore, founder and executive director of the anti-poverty nonprofit Share Our Strength, attests to the power of chefs to bring in charitable funds. They help Share Our Strength raise $20 million annually, and Shore guesses that total charity dollars raised by chefs approach $100 million.

Emeril is the king here, too. His Emeril Lagasse Foundation raises more than $1 million annually-that's one guy. His presence alone can generate tens of thousands of dollars in an evening. Recently in New York, dinner for 20 prepared by him and his pal Mario Batali was auctioned off for $100,000, money that will benefit children in post-Katrina New Orleans.

But who is this man, Emeril, really? We see him hawking Crest or watch him shouting at his food and chatting like a culinary Jay Leno with his band on Emeril Live, and he seems to be

an affable Everyman. What's behind this mask?

"He's a much different person in life than he is on the show," says Norman Van Aken of the acclaimed Norman's restaurant in Miami Beach. Van Aken has been a friend of Lagasse's since before the fame. "You'd never call Emeril a hot dog or a show off." Though he did smash a chair over a guy hitting on Van Aken's wife in a bar in the Keys-which is precisely the kind of guy you want to have around when some guy is hitting on your wife in a bar.

"It's been the type of success I wouldn't want to wish on a person of lesser capacity in terms of their psychological well-being because it is an immense load," Van Aken continues. "And it's a new load for a person who's a chef."

"He's such a sincere, generous person," says chef Ming Tsai, chef-owner of Blue Ginger in Wellesley, Mass., and host of PBS's Simply Ming. "Someone with that kind of fame, it usually goes to their head. It hasn't gone to his head."

"I think if anybody dissed him, it's because they didn't know him," says Batali. "Once you meet him, he's just a regular fun, cool, smart dude-who happens to be the No. 1 client for William Morris last year."

The man's such a celebrity that he's become hard to get to. When I visited the taping of his 1,500th show for the Food Network last May, I was led to a holding area and asked to wait for Emeril, who wanted to say hello. He came out and chatted for a moment, and then I was escorted out. And yet he was genuine and generous during interviews in New York, at Homebase, his headquarters on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, and during a dinner with his wife, Alden, at the chef's table in the kitchen of his first restaurant, Emeril's.

That restaurant launched him into the national food press, but what rocketed him to celebrity was television. He was the right guy in the right place at the right time with the right idea: merging entertainment and food TV.

"It certainly wasn't for the money," Lagasse says when asked why he

wanted to do television at a time when there was no Food Network and celebrity chefdom had yet to germinate. "I felt it would kind of be like going back to school. My team and I thought if we could reach out and make our industry grow, teach people a little bit more about food, wine, dining, eating, shopping, ingredients, then that would not only be a special thing to do, but it would also be a wonderful thing for someone like me, who's all about being in the hospitality business. That's all I know; I've been in it since I was 10." And he's still passionately devoted to that calling, he says: "When it comes to the restaurant business, that's where the light goes on, that's where the glow happens, that's where the passion is."

The key for him, says Lagasse, is the connection forged between restaurant and guest. "I focus on my customer," he stresses. "I have since day one, and they're still coming back-that and my staff. That means more to me than any award; that's what it's all about."

He's hoping he can lure customers (not to mention employees) back to his restaurants in the city that launched him, the city for which he has become a culinary symbol. His offices in New Orleans have recently reopened, and two of his three restaurants were scheduled to reopen in December.

But he's endured fierce criticism from locals who say he abandoned the city that made him famous just when it needed him most. Immediately after Katrina and flooding destroyed the city, when other celebrities, such as singer Harry Connick Jr. and chef Paul Prudhomme, returned to help boost morale and support efforts to rebuild, Emeril was nowhere to be seen.

"That Lagasse, one of popular culture's great media masters, took a pass on the chance to put his own mega-celebrity to good use at such an unprecedented moment is just one of many post-Katrina mysteries," wrote Brett Anderson in The Times-Picayune.

"You saw people putting celebrity to good use," Anderson told me later. "Emeril has put celebrity to good use-his own good."

Yet is Emeril, I wondered, being held to a different standard because of his celebrity? He continues to raise money for the city (a recent event in Las Vegas he spearheaded raised in a single evening a staggering $1.5 million) and to promote it, while still running his business and managing a daily work load that is scheduled 14 months in advance. Is he morally required to return to a deserted city simply to boost morale?

"Emeril's the most famous person in the city-yeah, we do hold him to a different standard," Anderson replies, noting that when city officials were debating

whether or not to rebuild New Orleans at all, the presence of Emeril, its most famous product, would have been enormously influential. "That was a message that was badly needed," Anderson says.

But William Barlow, who cooked at Delmonico's, Emeril's New Orleans steakhouse, defends Emeril. "He's doing a lot more than people know," says Barlow, who has returned to the city to help open Emeril's and Lagasse's second restaurant, Nola. Barlow says he felt genuinely cared for in the wake of the storm, received cash and offers to work in one of Emeril's restaurants outside the city.

Whatever one feels about Emeril's responsibilities and relationship to New Orleans, the anger there illustrates just how powerful chefs have become in our culture, and Emeril is the most powerful of them all because of his massive media presence and recognition. And precisely because of that, the most important legacies Emeril and other influential modern chefs leave may well have nothing to do with food, but rather with philanthropy-which is, in a way, hospitality for humanity.

"I've never forgotten where I came from," Lagasse said presciently before Katrina. "Nothing lasts forever."

Cleveland's Michael Ruhlman recently wrote about Emeril for Gourmet. Ruhlman has written a number of books, including Soul of a Chef, The French Laundry Cookbook, and his new Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking

and Curing.