Art versus chaos in the kitchen
The Bear is a show about food in the way that The Last of Us is a show about mushrooms. Sure, the mushrooms are there, but there’s a lot more going on below the surface. Life and death matter. Existential crises. Art versus commerce. Chaos versus order.
But wait: that doesn’t give due credit to the standout food moments in the show this season—whether it’s a Filipino breakfast, or a Minty Snickers Bar, or a perfect omelet filled with Boursin and topped with crushed potato chips.
Set in a crumbling Chicago sandwich shop that, in Season 2, is aiming to become a Michelin Star-aiming restaurant, The Bear makes the most of its carefully curated food shots: gorgeous plates that look like outtakes from Chef’s Table (though the background music is more likely to be Wilco or Radiohead than Hans Richter), or Pollock-like explosions of ingredients in what the chefs call a “chaos menu.”
But it also takes a deep dive into Season 1’s characters: there’s Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), the young chef who escaped toxic family life to become an award-winning chef de cuisine in NYC, only to implode under the pressure of tightrope-walking a Michelin Star kitchen every night. He returns home to run the sandwich shop of his ill-fated brother Michael (Jon Bernthal).
The kitchen is a toxic mess. Picture the claustrophobic cage of Adam Sandler’s Hidden Gems set in a tight kitchen shot—multiple-angle cameras capturing the fury and shouting, all up in your face, spiking adrenaline levels and heart rates. Reality shows like Top Chef may manufacture fingernail-biting finales, but The Bear climbs deep into the soul of concentrated panic, and how it eats away at people.
New sous chef Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) believes in Carmy’s wild dream to turn The Beef into something much greater. She becomes the soulful center of the kitchen, a center that cannot hold for long.
Then there’s cousin Richie (Ebon-Moss Bachrach), a walking, talking tower of chaos who can’t stand to see people trying to better themselves. In Season 1, he brought on the neg on the reg; in Season 2, he’s starting to think his approach is a downward spiral.
Other key players include pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce), veteran line cook Tina (Liza Colon-Zayas), Carmy’s accounting cousin Natalie (Abby Elliott), and Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), the money guy who offers bone-chilling real talk at various times.
The kitchen is a toxic mess. Picture the claustrophobic cage of Adam Sandler’s Hidden Gems set in a tight kitchen shot — multiple-angle cameras capturing the fury and shouting, all up in your face, spiking adrenaline levels and heart rates. Reality shows like Top Chef may manufacture fingernail-biting finales, but The Bear climbs deep into the soul of concentrated panic, how it eats away at people.
The second season picks up as the small, dysfunctional kitchen of The Original Beef of Chicagoland has been gutted, its walls and ceilings collapsed as it prepares for a big transformation. Likewise, the bruised characters are undergoing internal repair.
Show creators Christopher Storer and Joanna Calo know their turf. It’s a restaurant world, but it’s also our world. Behind the food, the show is really about the pursuit of perfection in a world that prefers chaos and entropy. Things fall apart, and Richie is always there (in Season 1, mainly) with a smirk, saying “Told you so, Cuz.”
It’s much harder to create order in a world that’s trying its best to fall to the ground, and Season 2 (premiering on Disney+ July 19) is about finding a Zen perch from which to operate: Marcus is sent to the stage in Copenhagen, on a houseboat, where he devises next-level desserts; Tina gets to train in a first-class kitchen with the best tools while the restaurant is under reconstruction; Natalie comes to grips with running the back office of a restaurant that is falling apart. And Carmy rediscovers high school crush Claire (Molly Gordon), an emergency medical technician who might just understand how toxic a job environment can be.
What makes The Bear stand out is the details, whether it’s the Chicago locales or dug-in accents, or the actual restaurants where Carm and Sydney do their research while devising their new menu. There’s a cameo set in the only Fil-Am restaurant to win a Michelin Star, Kasama, where Sydney tries the mushroom adobo and we briefly lay eyes on a Chicago-made longganisa breakfast. (Kasama opened during the pandemic, and the show makes use of that period to suggest how perilous it is to keep a restaurant afloat, even in the best of times.)
What comes through this season is how completely dedicated anyone in the food business must be—really on the verge of crazy determination —to make it all come together, night after night. It’s akin to live performance, mixed with action painting, mixed with preparation and luck, mixed with prayer. There’s a lot of that in The Bear.
Whatever moments of relative sanity and peace there are in Season 2 are counterbalanced by some of the most stressful exchanges you’ll find on any TV series. (Look for some excellent cameo work this season from Olivia Colman, Jamie Lee Curtis, Bob Odenkirk, Sarah Paulson, Will Poulter and recently detoxed comedian John Mulaney.)
Along with 2022’s The Menu and 2021’s Boiling Point, a one-take drama starring Stephen Graham as a scouse chef whose world (and kitchen) is falling apart, The Bear maybe represents a new entertainment genre—the nightmare kitchen—that is irresistible to both food lovers and consumers of pulse-racing drama.