This article contains spoilers for the first two seasons of “The Bear.”
The first season of FX’s “The Bear,” which debuted last summer, captured the breakneck speed and pressure-cooked stress of professional kitchens in shockingly vivid ways. Veterans of high-end restaurants and suburban chains alike saw themselves and their profession rendered in such startling detail that many of them described watching it not as a chill binge but as a PTSD-inducing experience.
Even viewers who hadn’t experienced that knife’s-edge milieu themselves couldn’t look away.
The show’s second season, which debuted last week, imagines something very different. The familiar ticking-clock tension is back. There is yelling and stress-smoking and Pepto-Bismol slugged from the bottle to quell waves of deadline-induced, failure-fearing bile. But one of the central questions is whether the two chefs at its heart — the obsessive Carmen “Carmy” Berzzato and his optimistic right hand, Sydney — can break the cycles of toxicity to create a restaurant culture that is actually good.
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Throughout the 10 episodes, the walls of the Beef — the old-school Chicago sandwich shop that Carmy inherited from his late brother and that he and Syd are turning into an upscale eatery — are peeled back (or in one memorable scene, they topple over). Beneath the yellowed photos and posters and menus, the structure is riddled with grease and mold and bad vibes, and its demolition and rebuilding mirrors the transformation that Carmy and Syd are trying to lead.
Season 2 of “The Bear” centers on the two chefs attempting to build something better from the poisoned soil of the twin gardens from which it sprang: the fine-dining tradition that formed (and warped) Carmy, who suffers from flashbacks of an abusive chef who trained him, and the sloppy, noxious ethos of the greasy spoon where many of the kitchen crew became set in their ways.
The fictional struggles of the Bear’s gang in some ways mirror the real-world conversations that chefs and restaurant workers have been having in recent years, often in the public eye, about kitchen culture. Of course, there are still plenty of chefs who take advantage of employees; sexual harassment and assault remain rampant. But there’s a growing awareness in some quarters that the long-standing hallmarks of many people’s experience in the industry — the violence and screaming, drug use and drinking; racism and sexism — don’t have to be.
Those themes resonate with some real-life chefs who are watching this season.
When they need to staff up, Carmy and Syd do something that many healthy workplaces do — they promote from within, offering training opportunities to their existing employees to help them meet their new challenges. The new season of “The Bear” is preoccupied with education, with line cooks Tina and Ebraheim sent to culinary school to learn more refined techniques of the kind of cuisine the reimagined restaurant will be serving. Pastry savant Marcus goes to Copenhagen to stage with a Yoda-like instructor (whose gentle admonitions — “Again, chef. Again” — and humane advice serve as the flip side to the barking chef of Carmy’s nightmares). Richie, Carmy’s wisecracking, rough-around-the-edges cousin finds his purpose — it turns out he’s a natural at front-of-the-house hospitality — during a similar training interlude at a Michelin-starred restaurant.
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Paul Smith, the James Beard-nominated chef at 1010 Bridge in Charleston, W.Va., is a believer in what education can do. Every year, he pays to send one of his cooks to culinary school, even pulling them from the line at the more casual sports bar, the Pitch, that he also owns. He looks for someone with aptitude or a great palate who just needs a little exposure to fine dining to excel — or as he puts it, the exact opposite, a worker who others might write off as a “lost cause,” maybe because they’ve dealt with addiction or incarceration.
Share this articleShare“I want to give them the confidence to ask the right questions — maybe even to challenge the way I’ve done things,” Smith says. “I’m open to that. There are new techniques since I graduated from the [Culinary Institute of America] in 2002.”
For many chefs, education happens in more informal ways, on almost every shift. At 1310 Kitchen & Bar in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood, chef Jenn Crovato says her role is first and foremost to train people properly. “If a dish isn’t turning out right — at least at first — it’s about training, and that’s on me,” she says. “I have to be accountable.”
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Crovato’s own background in fine-dining kitchens, she says, almost prevented her from opening her own restaurant. “The experience I had was really bad, and so when it was possible to have my own space, I thought, ‘I don’t want a restaurant, they’re just bad places to work,’” she says. “But I realized that I can create a different culture. It doesn’t have to be like that.”
She admits that she might not be the best model of work-life balance (she binged the show’s new season while working until 4:30 a.m. to deliver a catering order), but she says she’s learned that the best way to forge a better workplace is just to set an example. “If you have bad people at the top, that affects everything else — it’s a ripple effect.”
Culture shifts can happen in small but meaningful ways, too. In the show's first season, Carmy’s insistence that the crew address each other as “chef” or wear matching aprons seemed a pretentious affront, but by this season the changes are taking hold. Even Cousin Richie has learned to control the casually racist and sexist language he’s used to slinging. And chefs around the country have found similar tweaks. Some have done away with shift drinks in an effort to discourage boozy decompression or offered wellness benefits.
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Another strain that runs through “‘The Bear” is the characters’ efforts to find better ways of communicating in the kitchen (and out of it, but we’ll stick to the professional functions for this purpose). The kind of yelling associated with demanding chefs trying to berate the best out of their staff, says Smith, isn’t just stressful, it can be counterproductive.
“The difference between being a great chef and a good cook is to not get rattled,” he says. “Which is why the yelling, the screaming is not good — if you’re scared to mess up, you’re not going to learn that.”
Just like their on-screen counterparts find, it might be difficult to eradicate on-the-job raised voices, many denizens of professional kitchens say. The trick, though, is to address it. “You make it right,” says Crovato. “You can say, ‘I was in the weeds, I popped off.’ And then you just try not to. ”
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Carmy and Syd land on a touching way of defusing their conflicts. In one early scene, Carmy forms a fist with his hand and rubs it against his chest. Syd at first thinks the dish they’re tasting has given him heartburn, but he explains that it’s sign language for “I’m sorry.” The gesture is used later in the season to quell a squabble.
All of which might make for gloriously entertaining television — and maybe better IRL workplaces for some, but Tanya Holland, a California-based chef, author and restaurateur, says the restaurant industry needs a more fundamental overhaul to truly be a healthy environment. She says the jobs must be more “professionalized” — and that doesn’t just mean wearing chefs’ whites or even simply treating colleagues with respect. Her checklist? Living wages, 401(k) plans and a legitimate HR system, to start.
Holland says “The Bear” gets a lot right about how kitchens function. When the first season debuted, she found herself texting with a former colleague. “She asked, ‘Are you watching The Bear, aka our lives in 1995?’”
“The problems are not so much the industry’s as much as they are society’s. It’s a microcosm of racism, patriarchy and capitalism. Restaurants are just such a tight intimate box that it gets exaggerated there,” she says. “We’ve got to fix it all.”
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