Seeking Stars
My take on Season 3 of the Bear, and where I think it's going
Spoilers ahead for Season 3 of The Bear, so if you’ve never watched, this post is not for you.
Over the last two weeks, I’ve been a bit AWOL online. After our annual trip to Western MA and the glory of Tanglewood last weekend, the last few days were eaten up with recipe testing, last-minute revisions, and a viral bug that required more bedrest than usual. However, I did manage to finish Season 3 of The Bear, and following on my last column, I’ve been thinking about the show’s relationship to the art of paying attention—in and out of the kitchen.
For those who haven’t watched The Bear, a quick summary: the show chronicles the efforts of the kitchen crew of a restaurant in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, originally an Italian roast beef shop known for its sandwiches soaked with jus and generously topped with sweet roasted peppers or hot giardiniera. The shop’s former owner, Michael “Mikey” Berzatto, had died by suicide, leaving the business to his younger brother, Carmen or “Carmy” (Jeremy Allen White). Though he silently mourns for Mikey, Carmy’s aim is not to preserve The Beef as it was, but to reshape it into an elevated restaurant like those in which he was taught—among them The French Laundry, Daniel, Noma, and a fictionalized version of the Chicago restaurant Ever. With his new chef de cuisine, Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) there to back him up, Carmy instructs the staff of the Beef on adopting the French brigade system, but more importantly, on the principles of the professional restaurant kitchen as he was taught. He insists that everyone call each other “Chef” as a sign of mutual respect, to manage their stations with rigorous attention to cleanliness and precision, to move around a kitchen with efficiency and mutual regard. It’s mostly an unsuccessful battle, especially as Carmy’s impulses for professionalization run up against those of tradition, represented by the resentment of Carmy’s family friend Richie (Ebon Moss-Bacharach). But it’s clear that each person is slowly inspired to work better and harder because of small triumphs within this system. Tina (Liza Colon-Zayas) is resistant to the new management until Sydney praises a recipe she struggled to master. The pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) becomes fascinated with Carmy’s collections of restaurant cookbooks, and begins experimenting with new desserts to satisfy his curiosity. And even after once quitting in protest to Carmy’s abusive outbursts, Sydney’s belief in Carmy’s brilliance and the potential of the spot persists. When Carmy stumbles on Mikey’s hidden cache of cash (a deus ex spaghetti sauce, if you will), Carmy and Sydney agree to work together to usher The Beef into its fine-dining second life, renamed as…you guessed it.
At numerous points in the course of The Bear, it seems like everyone involved shows up to work for the joy of cooking alone, disregarding the financial, physical, and emotional consequences of the work. As I noted in a previous post, there is no shortage of joyful tasting or cooking sequences in the series, especially when two characters who haven’t previously connected do so—for example, Sydney and Carmy’s sister Natalie (Abby Elliot) bond over an exceptionally prepared omelette. The show does a spectacular good job of highlighting the moments of satisfaction found in a honest day’s work, moments that rarely garner direct praise, but rather quiet discoveries of personal strength. (Case in point “Forks,” the best episode of Season 2, in which Richie’s stage at Ever gives him newfound respect for the hospitality industry and for himself.) Season 2 culminates with a friends-and-family “soft opening” of The Bear not simply because it makes sense within the show’s timeline, but because it makes the emotional stakes for every character abundantly clear. The only person for whom the soft opening doesn’t work is Carmy, because midway through the service, he gets locked in the walk-in and sabotages his relationship with his new girlfriend Claire (Molly Gordon).
Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Season 3 is a rejection of the personal stakes of cooking, and a focus on external validation: an eight-episode quest to explore what happens when you seek the approval of everyone around you, but give no attention whatsoever to the people who know you. It is a season that focused exclusively on the validation that has become the bread and butter of food media (rather than actual diners): the quest for a Michelin Star, the anticipation of a first review, the financial stability (if it ever manifests) for a new restaurant. And perhaps it’s no surprise that Carmy’s obsession with validation—by the acclaimed chefs who trained him (who make numerous cameos as themselves), by the critics whose potential verdicts flash before him like a horror movie—begins to drive every aspect of the restaurant’s workings. Gone are the fleeting moments of joy in Sydney’s omelette or Richie’s table-side service; instead we are meant to feel the stakes rising alongside our blood pressure, the sense of exhaustion that comes after an evening of never-ending dish misfires and sunk costs. Instead of being driven by a sense of possibility, as the first two seasons were, The Bear has now positioned itself as a show about performance—and about the constant, often misguided, quest for the audience’s approval, especially if you’re certain that what you’re making is art.
If you’ve worked in any aspect of the restaurant world, there’s a ton to recognize and admire about The Bear, and a ton within it that will make you refuse to turn it on. The showrunners, Chris Storer and Joanna Calo, have done an exceptional job of showing us both the beauty and trauma of service work, and give us specific highs and lows for each character to understand exactly what they’re going through. (Never did I empathize with someone so much as when Sydney, desperate to prove herself in Season 1, refused help from her colleagues and ended up spilling a 24qt of veal stock onto the floor of the walk-in. I had many a similar moment during my few brief stages, and silently swallowed my pride just as Sydney did.) But they also assume a lot about the viewers when it comes to culinary knowledge, especially in Season 3. We can immediately recognize Marcus’ season 1 chocolate cake as exceptionally made, and his season 2 “composed” desserts as a significant step up in his artistry—because we’ve been slowly schooled, as the staff of the Beef has, in what fine dining should resemble. Yet in looking at Carmy’s menu this season—never repeating a dish, so we never get familiar enough with it to know it—we’re supposed to shift gears and no longer expect a connection with what dishes show up on screen. Instead of feeling like specific, delicious, desirable food, like Sydney’s omelette or Marcus’s cake, we get the abstracted “wagyu,” always misfired but never actually on screen in any real and meaningful way. When the original sandwich from The Beef appears in Season 3’s best and sixth episode, “Napkins,” (directed with gorgeous humor and empathy by Ayo Edebiri), it offers a sense of connection the rest of the season seemed to lack. There was something so satisfying about watching Tina bite into that sandwich, moan with pleasure and relief, that helps us to understand what food can do if prepared well and served without pretension or need for recognition.
As much as I think this season didn’t hit the beats I wanted, I also think it’s doing more important endgame work than we might expect. Even though we’re left with a cliffhanger, the release of The Bear’s first review, we don’t have any sense of where it will land…or, more importantly, if its verdict will be received with joy, fear, or something in between. For all his obsession with prestige, we never actually know if Carmy wants a good review—as a rave would surely require that he stay in the game of an industry that is slowly but irrefutably killing him. By spending a season immersed in the signifiers of the culinary cognoscenti, I feel like we’re being set up for a season that rejects that community as the imprimatur of success, and that we’ll ultimately find something more joyous, and more delicious, on a much smaller scale. In some ways it feels like a mirror season of one of my other favorite shows, Mad Men, a show that was itself as much about perception as it was about art or advertising—making it, in short, the perfect show about American culture. Much as the silver-tongued charlatan Don Draper could not simply rise to the top without at least a momentary downfall, there is no way a show this realistic about the joys and traumas of the restaurant world will end with three Michelin stars—so we must, inevitably, prepare for the Bear’s closure. Yet I don’t mind at all, because it will finally deliver a much needed skewer to the the chef-as-artist, and end in a more honest, more sustainable space.
As The Bear heads towards its fourth—and, my guess is—final season, it will ask the viewers to question exactly what we value about high-end restaurants, and why we assign so much more value to the restaurants that offer an ever-changing tasting menu than the humble sandwich shops that serve the communities around them. Culinary artistry does not have to exist in service of fine dining alone, and though it’s fun to bring tweezers into almost every styling shot, it’s not a required element to bring people into a state of ecstasy when they sample your cooking. This may be obvious to home cooks, but it’s rarely a sentiment honored by depictions of fine dining in either film or print, and I’m excited to watch a television show this good meet me halfway. So if it’s on a trajectory anything like that of the final season of Mad Men, here’s my wishlist for the final season of The Bear: for Sydney to control her own workplace and set the terms for the staff’s treatment for the better, Working Girl-style. For Richie to find lucrative work as a restaurant group consultant and write his own Will Guidara-esque manifesto on hospitality. For Marcus to open his own pastry and dessert shop, and finally nail the perfect donut. And for Carmy, after abandoning the restaurant world at the height of his success, to sit down in his home kitchen, prepare a plate of spaghetti, and finally, finally, find satisfaction with his own work, no audience or critics necessary.
Recommended Reading: I’m headed to New York this week for a few days, and it seems only right that I should drop something here that offers insights into one of my favorite New York past-times: learning about the great apartment buildings of the past. This fabulous article by Adriane Quinlan in Curbed talks about the nine townhouses of the famed Turtle Bay Gardens apartment complex, its unusual shared garden, the many famous people who lived there, and the heiress-developer Charlotte Hunnewell Sorchan who made it all happen. Though I met one of the Turtle Bay residents, the editor Bob Gottlieb, many times during our overlapping time at Knopf, I never had the chance to visit his home in the complex, and now I’m kicking myself for not inviting myself ever. Perhaps I’ll wander by one of the nights I’m in town…
The Perfect Bite: During our weekend in Western Massachusetts, we had a few nights of terrific eats in and around town. But on our way back to Boston, we made a detour to my favorite halfway point, Northampton (home of Smith College, my almost alma mater) for lunch and a coffee pit stop. I already knew where I wanted to go, the Northampton outpost of the spectacular Western MA chain Shelburne Falls Coffee Roasters, where the staff is exceptionally welcoming and creative with everything they make. In addition to buying a bag of their Rainbow Roast to bring home, I tried a great coconut-based Vietnamese iced coffee, the perfect pick-me-up for the remainder of the ride home.
Cooked & Consumed: As this week has been mostly playing catch-up on work, then being bedridden with illness, it’s been a less-than-exceptional cooking week. However, I was very grateful that we’d stashed away a container of my father-in-law’s pasta e fagioli (minus the pasta, which we cooked up quick) for just such an occasion. Here’s a recipe for a particularly good version from (who else) Marcella Hazan in her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (1992), if you’re game to try it yourself:
(Serves 6)
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons chopped onion
3 tablespoons chopped carrot
3 tablespoons chopped celery
3 or 4 pork ribs, OR a ham bone with some lean meat attached, OR 2 little pork chops
2/3 cup canned imported Italian plum tomatoes, cut up, with their juice, OR fresh tomatoes, if ripe and firm, peeled and cut up
2 pound fresh cranberry beans, unshelled weight, OR 1 cup dried cranberry or red kidney beans, soaked and cooked as described below * OR 3 cups canned cranberry or red kidney
beans, drained
3 cups (or more if needed) beef stock OR 1 cup canned beef broth diluted with 2 cups water
Salt
Black pepper, ground fresh from the mill
Either maltagliati pasta, homemade OR 1/2 pound small, tubular macaroni
1 tablespoon butter
2 tablespoons freshly grated
Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
* Put the beans in a bowl and add enough water to cover by at least 3 inches. Put the bowl in some out-of-the-way corner of your kitchen and leave it there overnight. When the beans have finished soaking, drain them, rinse them in fresh cold water, and put them in a pot that will accommodate the beans and enough water to cover them by at least 3 inches. Put a lid on the pot and turn on the heat to medium. When the water comes to a boil, adjust the heat so that it simmers steadily, but gently. Cook the beans until tender, but not mushy, about 45 minutes to 1 hour. Add salt only when the beans are almost completely tender so that their skin does not dry and crack while cooking. Taste them periodically so you’ll know when they are done. Keep the beans in the liquid that you cooked them in until you are ready to use them. If necessary, they can be prepared a day or two ahead of time and stored, always in their liquid.
1. Put the olive oil and chopped onion in a soup pot and turn on the heat to medium. Cook the onion, stirring it, until it becomes colored a pale gold.
2. Add the carrot and celery, stir once or twice to coat them well, then add the pork. Cook for about 10 minutes, turned the meat and the vegetables over from time to time with a wooden spoon.
3. Add the cut-up tomatoes and their juice, adjust the heat so that the juice simmer very gently, and cook for 10 minutes.
4. If using fresh beans: Shell them, rinse them in cold water, and put them in the soup pot. Stir 2 or 3 times to coat them well, then add the broth/stock. Cover the pot, adjust the heat so that the broth bubbles at a steady, but gentle boil, and cook for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until the beans are fully tender. (If using cooked dried beans or canned: Extend the cooking time for the tomatoes in Step 3 to 20 minutes. Add the drained cooked or canned beans, stirring them thoroughly to coat them well. Cook for 5 minutes, then add the broth/stock, cover the pot, and bring the broth/stock to a gentle boil.
5. Scoop up about 1/2 cup of the beans and mash them through a food mill back into the pot. Add salt, a few grindings of black pepper, and stir thoroughly.
6. Check the soup for density: It should be liquid enough to cook the pasta in. If necessary, add more broth, or, if you are using diluted canned broth, more water. When the soup has come to a steady, moderate boil, add the pasta. If you are using homemade pasta, taste for doneness after 1 minute. If you are using macaroni pasta, it will take several minutes longer, but stop the cooking when the pasta is tender, but still firm to the bite. Before turning off the heat, swirl in 1 tablespoon of butter and the grated cheese.
7. Pour the soup into a large serving bowl or into individual plates, and allow to settle for 10 minutes before serving. It tastes best when eaten warm, rather than piping hot.
Ahead-of-time note: You can prepare the soup almost entirely in advance but stop at the end of Step 5. Add and cook the pasta only when you are going to make the soup ready for serving.