REVIEW: ‘The Bear’ Season 3 delves deeper into the stress and fury of a fine-dining kitchen

The bear claws forward

We pick up from the story arc that developed and was completed in season 2. Young, unstable chef Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) and his crew of misfits have successfully transformed his family’s sandwich shop into a fine-dining restaurant. 

With his family and ambitious chef de cuisine Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edibiri) by his side, the quest for a Michelin Star begins in earnest. 

The 10 episodes take us through some incredible heartbreak and woe, as well as some amazing emotional highs and moments of tenderness. Carmy and crew try to balance the crushing grind of operating a small business, all while maintaining their closest relationships.

Adding to that volatile soup is the shadow of Carmy’s elder brother Mikey—who committed suicide to be able to bequeath the resto to his younger brother—appearing to haunt him at the most unexpected moments.     

Pacing ebb and flow

What struck me first, and noticeably so, is the contrasting pace per episode. They ebb and rise, slowing and speeding. 

Episode 1’s “Tomorrow” is slow and stirring, almost a flowing montage of Carmy’s flashbacks to highlights of his training. One moment he’s in Copenhagen and the next he’s picking vegetables in a sprawling, sunny California garden. 

Then Episode 2’s “Next” ratchets up the pace and takes us back into the kitchen of The Bear, where Carmy's mental dysfunction leads him to become pushy, then tyrannical. 

Why? He wants to change the kitchen menu every day. Every. Single. Day. This gets plenty of pushback from Sydney and Richie (Ebon Moss-Bacharach), who is in charge of the front of the house. They are concerned about how this will affect service and diner relations.  

Ready for extreme close-up

The second immediate thing of note is the high number of close-ups and character monologues. It makes for a lot of claustrophobic shots of the actors’ faces and their nuanced expressions. It hammers home just how close you are to the back of a fine dining establishment. That physically close, you can’t help but form intimate bonds in those culinary trenches—the same thing that was noted in Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential.

Your cortisol levels will get to that familiar spike of stress by Episode 3 “Doors” where the crew, laboring under Carmy’s changing daily menu, tackles the grind of a month’s worth of service. 

Carmy slowly becomes a caricature of what he hates: a total scum of a leader who shouts, intimidates, and bullies out of nothing in the guise of the mantra “Every Second Counts.” The sheer amount of emotional abuse is intense, but you can appreciate and draw conclusions from how everyone is hopeful and trying despite all the speedbumps. They all want to believe that they are heading to a better place under Carmy’s harsh baton—a place of Michelin-approved success. 

True enough, it works. Before the season ends The Bear becomes a fine dining force majeure in the city. They’re rewarded with media features and Carmy becomes the caricature of a "successful chef." Press accolades and profiles aplenty. The adulation of other chefs. Quick flashes of the media lines include “Best Chef in Chicago,” but also the inevitable critical downers in opaque terms like “culinary dissonance” and “best worst fine-dining experience.” 

Dimensions to the ensemble

Through it all, the best thing about this season for me was how it wasn’t just full throttle all the way. It’s surely a development risk, after all, to take the time to give each character a fuller back story and risk losing the bottom end of your fans and their expectations. 

Chef Sydney gets an unexpected offer. Ritchie Jerimovich (a Berzatto “cousin”) finds that he can indeed be a pretty okay ex-husband and an even better father because of his training at the Ever restaurant. Natalie Berzatto aka Sugar has a huge life-changing moment in Episode 8, aptly titled “Ice Chips.” 

Trainee cook Tina Marrero (Liza Colon-Zayas) has one of the best stand-alone episodes in "Legendary." It might be my favorite episode as it details—in excruciating drudgery—Tina's rise from unemployment at the age of 46, after she suddenly gets retrenched from a confectionery company, to happy and cooking at The Beef through a chance meeting with Mikey.  

A lot of returning cast from the previous seasons are here, too. John Bernthal as the dead Mikey Berzatto is always a thespian force of nature when he is on-screen. Jamie Lee Curtis relishes her role as the manic-depressive Berzatto matriarch Donna. 

Guardians of the Galaxy’s Will Poulter is back as English-born Chef Luca from Denmark. Olivia Colman also makes an appearance as the iconic Chef Terry of Ever. Lots of one-off cameos are here, too. Watch out for John Cena and Josh Hartnett in surprising roles. 

Carmy's downward spiral

Yet, White as Chef Carmy is still our main protagonist. We get to see the depth of his talent and skills as the season progresses. It’s especially apparent in his incredibly detailed, richly drawn training journals. 

We also get to see the extreme trauma he’s undergone and how it’s affected him as a cook and a person, illustrating how he feels the weight of all his training and suffering to excel with The Bear, to indeed make every second count. 

"I wish I could have done more," he says to his Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), the restaurant's backer.

This statement of regret seems to encompass all his failings in life so far, from wanting to prevent Mikey from killing himself and wishing he could have made his mother Donna a little less insane. Most of all though, as he involuntarily closes his eyes and suffers through another stressful breakdown while cleaning a table from the day’s grime, it is his regrets about how he might have done things differently with his ex-girlfriend and childhood friend Claire (Molly Gordon).

One of the saddest moments in the latter episodes is Carmy locking himself up again in their freezer for a time out, only able to think about apologizing to Claire, especially since she showed him nothing but tenderness in season 2. 

Every second counts

All through his trauma montages, Carmy fixates especially on the abuse he experienced under Chef David Fields (Joel McHale), who made his life a living hell and was the chef most responsible for his frequent ulcers.

McHale’s Chef Fields, you may remember, is heavily inspired by real-life Chef Thomas Keller. A man known for his high-stress kitchen environments and his philosophy of timing and excellence through hard work, the mantra “Every Second Counts” is taken straight out of Keller’s “Sense of Urgency” playbook on how to run a successful restaurant empire.  

Season 3 might not be the kind of concentrated fix of stress that the two previous seasons were, but showrunner Christopher Storer’s decision to add dimension to each character by alternating the pace and imbuing breadth to character depth is something I highly appreciate.  

When the farcical Brothers Fak (real-life Chef Matty Matheson as Neil Fak and Ricky Staffieri as Ted Fak) are the sanest people in the kitchen at any given time, then you know The Bear is still very much a comedy. 

Yes, albeit one in the vein of Pierrot or Pagliacci. You may ugly cry and ugly laugh. Or both.    

All 10 episodes of FX’s The Bear are now streaming on Disney Plus.