Ember Grille & Wine Bar

The Restaurant

Ember Grille & Wine Bar holds the second-floor AAA Four Diamond steakhouse seat at L'Auberge Casino Resort on Avenue L'Auberge, the same headlining I-210 strip property that hosts Gordon Ramsay Steak on the adjacent wing. The dining floor seats around a hundred and twenty across a modern American steakhouse format - warm-walnut wainscoting, deep-cushioned leather banquettes, an exhibition wine wall on the western side of the dining room with the four-hundred-label cellar visible behind glass from every seat, white linen on every table, and a glass-walled exhibition kitchen at the back where the wood-fired broiler station and the dry-age locker run as theatre throughout dinner service. Ember has held the AAA Four Diamond award since 2007, the year following the L'Auberge property's opening, and remains one of only a handful of AAA Four Diamond restaurants in southwestern Louisiana.

The kitchen runs a programme organised around twenty-eight-day dry-aged USDA Prime beef and the four-hundred-label Wine Spectator-Best-of-Award cellar - bone-in cowboy ribeyes, the dry-aged tomahawk for two, the porterhouse for the larger booking, an Australian wagyu New York for the higher-end pacing and a Chateaubriand carved tableside for two that has been on the menu since the room opened. The seafood programme runs Gulf-sourced with Atlantic depth - Louisiana Gulf jumbo lump crab cake, a wood-fired Atlantic halibut in season, a chilled seafood tower for two with Louisiana Gulf shrimp, lump crab and oysters on the half-shell. The wine programme runs as the room's centrepiece - by-the-glass and Coravin-preservation pours from cult Napa Cabernets and Premier Cru Burgundies that are rarely seen by the glass anywhere in Louisiana outside the New Orleans grand fine-dining rooms.

Service runs at the upper edge of Gulf Coast casino fine dining: career captains drawn from the Pinnacle and Boyd portfolio in rotation, a sommelier on the floor every dinner shift with the four-hundred-label cellar to deploy, and tableside finishes - Chateaubriand carving, Caesar preparation, Bananas Foster - that bring the dining-room theatre that the Ramsay Steak format on the adjacent wing intentionally avoids. The Saturday-night soundtrack stays low enough to host a real conversation across the table. For a L'Auberge property evening that needs the AAA Four Diamond architecture and the deeper wine programme rather than the celebrity-chef format, Ember Grille & Wine Bar is the address that has held the second-floor steakhouse seat since the resort opened.