The second episode of the Chicago-based comedy-drama The Bear, which is now airing on Disney+, opens strangely. Gone is the noisy, lived-in kitchen of the family sandwich shop that Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) has returned home to run after the suicide of his brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal). Instead we are in a silent, bright, sterile space, where everyone wears pristine white hats and striped aprons.
We come to understand that we are flashing back to Carmy’s time as a culinary wunderkind, beloved by the food media, working in Michelin-starred restaurants in New York City. The room we’re seeing is the kitchen that he once worked in, more like a hospital than a place where food – nourishment – is made.
Carmy shouts out complex order numbers and arranges perfect morsels – terrines, glistening egg yolks – on plates under the withering gaze of a much taller chef, who berates him as he goes. “I get it, you have a short man’s complex,” the chef says, looming over him. “You can barely reach over this f***ing table. This is why you have the tattoos and your cool little scars.”
This is the persona that male chefs running extremely fancy restaurants tend to occupy in the popular imagination: brutally authoritative and unafraid to belittle their workers, often by swearing or shouting. We see this across both fiction (most recently via Stephen Graham’s powerhouse performance in Boiling Point) and in real life, via junior chefs talking about their experiences of macho bosses and abusive behaviour in fine food culture. On a more public-facing scale, Gordon Ramsay’s performative yelling may be a bit of a caricature at this point, but it’s certainly rooted in real behaviour.
The Bear, then, makes for a valuable addition to food media, because while it is many things – an experiment in stressing out its audience some episodes; a sombre meditation on the gentrification of Chicago in others – one of its most consistent themes is its interrogation, and ultimate rejection, of this tyrannical male chef persona. There is another way, it seems to say.
Many of us tuning in for the first time might not have expected this, considering the conversation that surrounded the show before it hit screens. On the surface, in episode one, Carmy looks like your typically grizzled “dirtbag chef”: he’s tattooed (Allen White’s tattoos for the role were designed by the same artist, Ben Shields, who drew up Ryan Gosling’s character’s tattoos for the 2012 film The Place Beyond the Pines), his hair is artfully mussed-up, and he wears a uniform of white T-shirts and skate trousers.
This is a sort of sub-genre of male chef that populates fictional food media (the horrible boyfriend Magnus in season one of Love Life is a great example; Bradley Cooper in the slightly silly Burnt is another), as well as the real-life dating apps of major cities. Indeed, before the show aired in the US and promo photos of Allen White in character emerged, a number of tweets about his aesthetic similarities to the type of man you’d meet in a bar for (to put it politely) a one-night-stand went viral. So seeing Carmy, the character we might anticipate to be espousing the attitudes we expect from cocky, overtly masculine chefs, actually being on the receiving end of it, is surprising. Early on in the series, it unlocks much of his vulnerability, and the dramatic climax of the season as a whole hinges on Carmy’s own descent into these habits and attitudes in a later episode.
When the restaurant sets itself up to accept delivery orders, an error made by the otherwise highly competent and hard-working sous chef Sydney (who has come to the restaurant specifically to work with Carmy, aware of his reputation, and who describes leaving previous roles because of poor treatment by withering, screaming, red-faced chefs) makes it impossible for the cooks to keep up with the demand. Carmy sees red, transforming before our eyes into one of the demon chefs who made his own life such a misery. It’s a sad moment, which offers a real insight into how these power cycles perpetuate – though instead of allowing them to continue, Carmy’s staff stand up to him.
Sydney (played with great possession by Ayo Edebiri) and gentle pastry chef Marcus – whose attempts at the perfect donut, explored through a delightful side-plot throughout the season, are destroyed in Carmy’s rage – walk out, refusing to stand for this cliched show of machismo. Narratively, it’s an important point in the show, and when they do eventually return, Carmy’s apology feels like a threshold crossed. It won’t happen again.
The season ends with a symbol: the promise of a new restaurant in place of the sandwich shop, and perhaps a new way of doing things. It will be called, as Carmy and Mikey are both nicknamed throughout the show (their family name is Berzatto), The Bear.
TV should never have to be instructive to be worthwhile – this bears repeating in our current landscape, which seems to base merit on moral purity. The Bear’s first season’s magical-realist ending keeps its various redemption arcs within the realms of fiction. But that is not to say that there aren’t genuine takeaways: ultimately, it is a deeply rooted and painstakingly realistic show, from the costumes to the way restaurant culture is presented, with “family” meals for the staff and an unflinching look at backroom politics. It’s a genuinely hopeful story, and it shows how the uncaring, despot head chef persona can be consigned to the past.
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