http://www.nola.com/treme-hbo/index.ssf/2011/02/as_no_reservations_enters_a_ne.html

Yeah I’m real psyched:

“My wife had the sense to say, ‘You know, you’re making this show about New Orleans,’” Simon said. “‘You’re talking to chefs in New Orleans. They can give you the interior perspective. As far as the exterior perspective of the culinary world — how they view New Orleans, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse — I think Anthony would be a great person to talk to. And if you talk to him, you better let me come with you to lunch.’”

The couple had actually met Bourdain years ago at a “dreary little mystery-writers” gathering in England, Bourdain said. “I had no memory of the event.”

The second meeting was more eventful.

“I’ve said many times, and believe it absolutely, that ‘The Wire’ was the single greatest achievement of the television medium,” said Bourdain, of Simon’s previous HBO series. “So when suddenly I get a phone call from David Simon inviting me to lunch and asking me if I’d be interested in working on the show, it really was like being a lifelong Yankees fan and having Joe DiMaggio call up and say, ‘How about we throw the ball around in the back yard.’ It was really that out of the blue, that seismic of an event for me.”

“We sort of knew him a little bit, but it was basically a big excuse to hang out with Tony Bourdain and get amuse-bouched to death,” Simon said, adding that Lippman’s idea “progressed from us coming up with a lame excuse to have lunch with him to a real discussion of the show.”

The specific storyline discussed was the one that had chef Janette Desautel bound for “a certain amount of exile” in New York at the end of season one, Simon added.

Hilarious.