As if great acting, great stories, and amazing music weren’t enough to make HBO’s Treme (now in its second season) worth watching, the producers have stirred a culinary plot line into the show and hired celebrity chef extraordinaire, Anthony Bourdain to help write it for them. Since the city of New Orleans is as much a character on the show as Davis or Ladonna or Antoine, it isn’t surprising to get glimpses into actual New Orleans restaurants; but, were the scenes in Eric Ripert’s famous New York seafood restaurant, Le Bernardin REALLY Le Bernardin?
Yes! Yes, they were. That was really the kitchen where Eric Ripert creates the food in the best seafood restaurant in the country. Many of the chefs in the Le Bernardin scenes are really Ripert’s cooks. And, yes, that was Eric Ripert’s little office off the kitchen.
The Le Bernardin scenes do not mark Chef Ripert’s first appearance on Treme. Last season, when Treme character Chef Janette Desautel still had her own restaurant in New Orleans, Tom Colicchio, David Chang, Wylie Dufresne, and Eric Ripert showed up unannounced and asked Janette to whip them up whatever she was in the mood for. Not surprisingly, this is one of the scenes co-written by Anthony Bourdain, and it was Bourdain who talked his friends into making an appearance on the show. Tom Colicchio has returned this season as the chef who is helping Janette find her way in New York, and it is his recommendation that takes Janette to Le Bernardin.
The other professional New York kitchen and restaurant featured on Treme this season, Brulard’s, is not real. According to the Treme website, Chef Brulard is an amalgam of true horror stories about temperamental chefs, but he is not a real person, and that is not a real place, even though it was really convincing even for the chefs who participated in producing those scenes.
So, if you are a foodie and you haven’t yet caught on to Treme, it is now time to get busy! If you already subscribe to HBO, you can watch all the episodes (and many more great HBO shows on HBOGO.)Nowhere on television will you find such amazing music. The acting and storytelling is wonderful. And, unless you are one of the few who will ever don a white cloche cap and cook on the line at an elite restaurant, Treme is also the best chance you have to see what a real professional kitchen looks like.
