Sometime over the past few decades, a strange thing happened: We started treating chefs as temperamental rock stars and restaurants as a barometer of cultural vitality. While pursuits like fashion, music, art and film all seemed to stagnate, retreating into repetition and nostalgia as the economics of these industries cratered, food surged ahead, becoming a rare bright spot in a culture stuck for new ideas. Seasonal, showy, produce-driven cooking was everywhere, and every medium-size city throughout the country had its artisanal pizza place, its special-occasion farm-to-table restaurant, its ramen spot with big ideas about broth.
But with growing cultural importance came heightened scrutiny of the restaurant industry’s failings: poor pay, punishing hours, a toxic culture of macho aggression and brutality. From the reported bullying and violence at Mission Chinese Food in New York to allegations of chronic mold at the Los Angeles jam destination Sqirl, the restaurant business suddenly seemed like a problem industry, just like aviation, fashion and finance, where the catalog of abuses was as long as any tally of creative accomplishments.
Into this environment in 2022 came “The Bear,” a show that seemed both forged in the fire of the food world’s worst excesses and determined to seek a way out of the inferno. Through its first two seasons (the third dropped last night), it follows Carmen Berzatto, known to everyone as Carmy, a hotshot chef called back to Chicago after his brother dies by suicide and leaves him the family restaurant. “The Bear” is both the culmination of two decades of chef veneration and a case for an improved version of it, a plea not to break from the religion of food altogether but to reform it and in doing so create a different culture that’s truly worthy of veneration. In the real world of professional kitchens — with their prosciutto-thin financial margins, boilingly stressful working conditions and entrenched hierarchies of abuse — “The Bear” might seem like a flimsy case for change. But the televised fantasy of a better, more moral restaurant culture, with better, more moral chefs, is part of what makes the show such intoxicating entertainment.
Carmy exhibits both the worst and the best elements of the tortured chef-genius archetype. For centuries, the glory of art excused the sins of the artist, and people happily appreciated the work of Céline, Picasso, Beethoven and all the rest despite the monstrousness of their personalities. Our culture started venerating chefs who exhibited this kind of creative callousness: David Chang, Marco Pierre White, Mario Batali and even Anthony Bourdain were all, in their different ways, avatars of the bawdy, abusive world of the male-dominated kitchen, and their accounts of culinary life glorified the notion that conflict is endemic to gastronomic invention.
We had a tendency to forgive or at least ignore those traits, since witnessing Mr. Bourdain’s journeys into the global culinary wonderland or the spectacle of Guy Fieri racing toward another diner in his convertible through an eternal American summer created a pervasive sense of excitement around food and all its possibilities. On the plate, if nowhere else, things in America seemed to be getting better.
In recent years there’s been a profound and important shift in public attitudes. “The Bear” is perhaps best appreciated as a kind of real-time metabolizing of the tension between temperament and creation. The show presents us with a tortured genius, but it helps us understand why he’s tortured and emphasizes — most important to the narrative’s moral scheme — that he wants to get better. Ultimately, the show grapples with the question: Can our love affair with restaurant culture be redeemed?
Carmy’s overlapping emotional struggles are at the core of the action: his struggle to keep the restaurant afloat; the struggle to honor the memory of his brother, an addict who had become emotionally distant and destructive; the struggle to push the boundaries of culinary invention, to keep high standards, to make good food, to be a good boss, to be a good person. Among the most powerful emotional reference points is a flashback to Carmy’s time working as the chef de cuisine at a fine dining restaurant in New York. Played with a pleading droopiness by Jeremy Allen White, Carmy struggles to stay on top of tickets during a service push as the restaurant’s head chef approaches and whispers a string of demoralizing invective in his ear: “You’re terrible at this. You’re no good at it. Go faster,” adding, “You are talentless” and “You should be dead.”
On one level, Carmy agrees. But the show insists that we keep faith in him and the pursuit to which he’s dedicated his life. The backbone to the narrative is his quest to renovate his brother’s beloved greasy spoon into an inventive, professional, elevated neo-bistro — the type of destination restaurant where the menu includes adventurous wines and savory cannoli, the service exudes casual culinary authority and a wide variety of staff members refer to one another as “chef.” If Season 1 threw us headlong into the chaos of a restaurant on the brink of both obliteration and rebirth and Season 2 gave us a glimpse into the characters’ back stories and motivations, then Season 3 promises a different kind of progress and even a sense of emotional resolution. The show’s power lies in grappling with the industry’s most important dilemmas — such as whether something better, healthier and more stable can emerge from modern kitchen culture and whether it’s possible to be artistic, original and aesthetically radical and produce interesting work — while maintaining emotional equilibrium.
Through it all, “The Bear” has understood and portrayed the restaurant business in all its ugliness. But it doesn’t ask us to move on from worshiping chefs. It simply asks for better chefs, nicer chefs, chefs who are more in touch with their emotional triggers and blind spots — who win Michelin stars, yes, but who also know when they’ve done something wrong and have the maturity to apologize afterward.
For now, a restaurant like the one on “The Bear” feels as though it’s possible only on TV. As the show matures, though, it can move us beyond the simplistic narratives of good and evil, genius and tyranny, and inspiration and devastation that marked the first stage of our collective obsession with food, which long since became a cultural issue along with a nutritional one. Chefs already made for good antiheroes; now maybe they can be worthy heroes.
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