The Bear: This Celebrity Chef Is Worried About The Effect The Show Might Have
Contains spoilers for Season 2 of "The Bear"
Set in Chicago, "The Bear" might seem, to many, like a love letter to the city's cuisine, from its deep-dish pizza to its fine-dining Michelin star spots. One Chicago-based chef doesn't see it that way at all, though.
Rick Bayless, who owns Chicago-based restaurants like Frontera Grill and Topolobampo, said during a chat at the Wall Street Journal Global Food Forum that the show "pushed [restaurants] back another 20 years." Elaborating, Bayless explained, "If you're a mother of a teenage boy that's watching that show and he goes, 'Mom, I want to work in restaurants,' would you let him? No you wouldn't. That's like the worst profession in the world."
"It's a profession," Bayless continued, clarifying that working in restaurants can be . "It's something that you can work for years and years, and you can work your way up ladders and you can learn craft and you can make a life for you and your family."
When it premiered in 2022, "The Bear" was lauded by industry veterans and professionals for its realistic approach to the cutthroat, often difficult industry, and commenters definitely hit back at Bayless when the WSJ put the clip on Instagram. @mbruder23 wrote, "If an accurate portrayal of a kitchen environment sets your industry back, maybe the problem isn't the show..." while @rosadojoel agreed: "Working as a career chef is brutal: the days are long, no security, lots of BS from many sides. The camaraderie is from trauma bonding."
A lot of The Bear shines a spotlight on tension and stress...
To be absolutely fair to Bayless, a lot of "The Bear" is stressful; some industry workers and veterans had trouble watching the series in the first place, unable to spend their relaxation time listening to shouts of "hands!" and "corner!" when they spend all day doing that anyway. In many ways, Season 2 doesn't let up where that overwhelming stress is concerned. As Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) and his motley crew try and turn The Beef into a fine dining restaurant to be called The Bear, they're all plagued with constant stress, much of which comes to a head as the season heads towards its finale.
In the sixth episode of the season, "Fishes," White is flanked by an all star cast as the show flashes back to Christmases at the Berzatto household, where his deeply troubled mother Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) overtakes the kitchen and creates the most tense environment you could ever possibly imagine. Then, in the show's season finale, titled "The Bear," the restaurant hosts a friends-and-family night of their new fine dining venture, only for Sydney (Ayo Edibiri) to get overwhelmed by the tickets while running the pass and Carmy to freak out and promptly get locked in the walk-in from the outside. These definitely aren't relaxing episodes of television, but Season 2 of "The Bear" does provide some catharsis during its run.
...but Season 2 provided real moments of levity
That said, what Season 2 of "The Bear" does so brilliantly is that it lets both its characters and the audience take a few breaths, especially in two of the season's most notable episodes — "Honeydew," the fourth, and "Forks," the seventh. In "Honeydew," aspiring pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) travels all the way from The Bear to Copenhagen, where Carmy once trained as a chef, and he sets out to learn from Luca (guest star Will Poulter), a London-born pastry chef who doesn't look down on Marcus for not already knowing every single recipe there is. Instead, Luca is kind, gentle, and helpful, and the two bond in the kitchen while they create pastries so lovely it's hard to imagine ever eating them.
"Forks," meanwhile, lets Ebon Moss-Bacharach's Richie — one of the show's most high-strung characters — relax when he also embarks on a training regimen, though he stays in Chicago and heads to a Michelin starred restaurant where diners wait for months to get in and pay thousands for a meal. Instead of it being a pretentious den of snakes, though, the restaurant is full of people who deeply care about what they do... and this all culminates in Richie's touching interaction with the legendary Chef Terry, played gently and perfectly by surprise guest Olivia Colman. Richie ends up walking away more inspired to work at The Bear than ever before, and thanks to the temporary stress relief, the audience is hopeful too... which makes one wonder if Rick Bayless has watched Season 2 of "The Bear." If he hasn't, it's streaming on Hulu now.