Dedication to craft purifies living. Crafts in the old fashioned sense (ars if we’re being fancy) are human activities requiring a high degree of skill. Often they are institutionalized and highly regimented—think of the workshops of the Old Masters or the scribes of Medieval monasteries. This dedication is partly instrumental. The products of craft often require extreme levels of time, concentration, and effort. This dedication isn’t always—or even often—instrumental for the participants, though. They often take the life of craft as worthwhile for its own sake.
The last few centuries have been unkind to crafts. The various technical revolutions in the last 150 years have killed off many and replaced them with mass produced consumer goods. Of course the products of great skill are still valued, but largely for economic reasons. This often hollows out the meaning of craft.
One craft that has vastly grown in prominence is cooking. Indeed, it is perhaps the craft that plays the widest and deepest social role in the modern world. We have never been more invested in skilled cooking, both at home and especially in restaurants. Despite being a notoriously difficult business that imposes a taxing, unhealthy lifestyle, restaurants are born and die constantly. There is a seemingly bottomless well of passion for the restaurant.
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We should be worried that our obsession with restaurants is fetishistic. Consider the world of so-called fine dining. The internet is fond of lambasting the more absurd parts of this world. This is for good reason, as these establishments can easily conflate the interesting with what their mega-rich clientele want to post on Instagram. Hollow, unearned pretension creeps into every pore.
Yet at its best, fine dining is transcendent. It demonstrates the limits of the craft of cooking. It forces reflection on the meaning of food and its roles in our lives; it can distill entire cultures. The achievements of the best fine dining restaurants are rightly lauded, and it is easy to become enamored with the world that produces such restaurants.
The Bear interrogates our passion for restaurants. For most of its run so far, it doesn’t seem sympathetic. The show is full of the downsides: Crazy schedules, working conditions that push workers to the brink, terrible business environments, and when it’s going well, a huge demand from a steady stream of strangers. The show seems to argue that restaurant culture is pathological.
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The Bear’s central character is Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto. Carmy is a master chef; he worked at Noma, The French Laundry, Daniel, and was the chef de cuisine at “the best restaurant in the world” in New York City—revealed in the third season to be the fictional Empire. He is deeply weathered from this experience, broken down. But cooking for other people with maniacal precision is engrained into him. When his sister asks him why he stayed at Empire despite the insanity of it, he simply says, “People loved the food.”
That world is behind him at the beginning of The Bear. He has come back to Chicago to run his family’s Italian beef sandwich restaurant, The Beef. He returns in haunting circumstances, following the suicide of his magnetic older brother Michael, or “Mikey”. As the show unfolds it is revealed that despite Carmy’s deep love for Mikey and their plans to open a restaurant, Mikey refused to let Carmy work with him at The Beef. This was a major contributing factor to Carmy’s leaving Chicago to become a culinary star. Mikey, meanwhile, fell into addiction and bad business practices.
Want a seven-minute rundown? The show has you covered.
The show is full of stunning characters. Sydney is a young, ambitious classically trained chef that seeks Carmy out immediately and talks her way into being his sous chef. She is at the beginning of the path that Carmy has just trodden, aware of its necessary blows but not fully acquainted with them. Richie was Mikey’s best friend, the one chosen to be Mikey’s right-hand man, both in life and at The Beef. When the show starts he is at the height of a trauma-induced spiral of Chicagoan toxic masculinity. Finally, Natalie (“Sugar” or “Sug”) is Carmy and Mikey’s sole sister. She hates The Beef and will not physically enter it in the first season. She is also clearly trying to break out of her family’s bad cycles; she marries a nice, square, definitely not Italian man and lives in what is clearly a new build condo.
The Beef is not fine dining; it is for the everyman on their lunch break. It is also a cornerstone of the community, more frequented by serious regulars than by first timers. It doesn’t produce the absolute best food, but it produces delicious food. When Carmy takes over, his focus is on saving it, and he can’t help but make it tastier. Mikey’s crew is resistant for much of the first season, but the proof is in the pudding.
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Even in a TV landscape filled with innovative producing and directing, The Bear is very distinctively put together. Many of its episodes are shot in an immensely frantic way, conveying the stress, pressure, and total bat-shit craziness of a restaurant kitchen. These episodes can be hard to watch, sputtering from disgusting messes around the kitchen to cooks on the verge of breakdowns to Carmy or Richie growing silent in their depressions. The pinnacle of this is the penultimate episode of season one, “Review,” which is shot in one bouncy, frenetic take.
Watch only if you aren’t triggered by kitchen chaos
Not all of it is shot like this. This is partly because the show is also a love letter to the city of Chicago. In fact, the intro of “Review” is a calm, beautiful montage of Chicago, perfectly paired with Sufjan Stevens’ “Chicago.” These snapshots of the wider world help keep the show, well, watchable. But they also provide crucial cultural context, reminding us what restaurants are for and of the role that they play in shaping a place and its people.
Cleanse your palate
The Beef is not a temple to the craft of cooking. It is more like a cafeteria than a monastery or tapestry workshop. Of course, not all restaurants are like The Beef in this way. Some are formal, regimented, and precise for the sake of producing exceptional products. They are deeply serious.
Carmy conquered the hierarchy of this world. He internalized its logic—everything in the kitchen should clean and organized; the tape should be cut using knives, not torn; the pots and pans should be at a 45° angle on the stove during service because “every second counts.” But the world of fine dining also left him deeply scarred.
Carmy’s Empire Demon, David Fields
While Carmy initially seems keen to put the pressures of fine dining behind him, Sydney’s ambition reignites his old dream of opening a grander restaurant on the site of The Beef. So by the middle of the second season, it has been decided that The Beef will be replaced by The Bear. The Bear, of course, is supposed to distinguish itself from the toxic restaurant culture that Carmy loathes (or pretends to loathe). They fully intend to staff The Bear with the core employees of The Beef.
Richie is no cook. He is, in his way, the restaurant’s people person. But he is also skeptical of the pretensions of “fancy” restaurants. He constantly makes fun of Carmy’s pretensions, despite his full awareness that Carmy’s food tastes better. He never dislikes something Carmy makes. Yet he is skeptical, probably because it is very easy to be skeptical about elevating food to art—a word derived from ars.
In order to prepare him for the transition, Richie is forced to stage—intern—for a week at semi-fictional Chicago restaurant Ever. Richie is convinced that Carmy is making him do it just to get him out of the way. In his first scene, he struggles to get out of bed at 5:38. As he goes in for the first time he says, “Fuck you, cousin.”
Richie is assigned to shining forks. He asks if every stage has to shine forks his whole first day. His boss tells him that that is the stage assignment for the first week, and that the lucky stages get to move on to spoons. As Richie checks the last fork of the day for streaks, he repeats his earlier curse on Carmy.
Although he is intrigued by the maniacal workings of the place, he bristles at the restaurant’s seriousness, which leads, on day three, to a heart-to-heart with his boss.
doing it for its own sake
By day six his worldview has expanded. He can see why people drink the Kool-Aid. He offers himself to the restaurant and is nicely turned down. He sadly says that he is needed elsewhere. He comes in for his final day unsure about how to move forward. Looking for the cutlery polish, he runs across the previously unseen chef of the restaurant, Chef Terry. This is none other than the Queen herself, Olivia Coleman, who delivers a quietly brilliant five minutes.
chef’s kiss
What Richie learns from Garrett and Chef Terry is that the food is a conduit for the restaurant’s real aim: hospitality. These days, hospitality is more likely to be associated with midwestern niceties or the Holiday Inn than true virtue. This has not always been so. As anyone who has read Homer knows, hospitality is no joke.
Graciously extending oneself to strangers is a mark of respect for humanity. An 18th-century philosophical encyclopedia describes it as “the virtue of a great soul that cares for the whole universe through the ties of humanity” and says that “the just measure of this type of beneficence depends on what contributes the most to the great end that men must have as a goal, namely reciprocal help, fidelity, exchange between various states, concord, and the duties of the members of a shared civil society.” To be hospitable is to show the sort of love reserved to intimates to strangers. Restaurants aim to nourish strangers in the sorts of ways Nonnas do.
In a montage designed to show his conversion, Richie reads Will Guidara’s book Unreasonable Hospitality. This is one of the show’s many flexes designed to demonstrate how plugged in they are to restaurant culture. Guidara is the real-world co-founder of Eleven Madison Park and has leveraged this success to become a sort of hospitality guru (a TED talk of his, if you dare). I have not read the book but its marketing does not make me want to. The first sentence of the blurb is “Today, every business can choose to be in the hospitality industry.” No Homer here.
This could be braggadocio on behalf of the showrunners–Guidara is an executive producer. It could also be an expression of ambivalence about the deeper ethical calling of the restaurant. Hospitality is a virtue and it is admirable to cultivate it through restaurant craft. Having an institution dedicated to taking care of people through food is worthy of a life project. But it can also be hijacked by capitalism and instrumentalized. I’m sure Guidara has sold quite a few books since the episode “Forks” aired.
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The first two seasons were met with near universal acclaim. Despite garnering a record number of Emmy nominations, the third season, released in late June, has been met mostly with critical derision. It’s not hard to see why. The first episode sets the tone. It is an extended bounce through time with barely any dialogue. More than its earlier subtle flexes, the show now seems completely dedicated to demonstrating how many famous chefs the showrunners now know. We see Carmy at Noma, Daniel, The French Laundry, and Chef Terry’s fictional Ever, gazing fondly at these geniuses who, in case you forgot, really love the showrunners.
The formal techniques also start to drag, mainly because the show isn’t really doing anything with them. As the season moves on, the focal point becomes whether Carmy is the villain. He has (once again) become obsessed with gaining a Michelin star, which means that he starts treating everyone like shit. We are told that the best lesson he learns from his Empire demon David Fields is to always “subtract”. Somehow this translates into his changing the menu literally every night. The best episodes are the ones that don’t involve him. Thankfully, on some level the showrunners know this and give us several episodes very light on Carmy. The best is totally Carmy-free, focusing on how Tina—one of the cooks—came to The Beef.
In short, it’s easy to see season three as the show “getting high off its own supply”—an expression that appears in a lot of the reviews. “Look at us, we’re loved by Thomas Keller! Our camera work is so clever! We’re really deep! Rene Redzepi also thinks we’re cool! Rene Redzepi!”
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Well, maybe. The third season continues to interrogate fine dining and the celebrities it creates. On the surface, it appears to have been completely captured by a culture of fetishization. The cameos come thick and fast, especially in the first and last episodes. This mostly involves Carmy stargazing, agog by the genius.
Much of the season is anchored by Chef Terry’s decision to close Ever for good. This sets up the final episode, which revolves around Ever’s “funeral” service, a final meal attended by the chefs and staff most important to the restaurant. This is the ultimate cameo opportunity, and we see celebrity chefs and restaurateurs Guidara, Grant Achatz, Wylie Dufresne, and Rosio Sanchez, among others.
The middle portion of the episode contains a discussion between three of the characters and many of the cameos about restaurants. The gist is that the chefs are addicted to hospitality. To use Guidara’s admittedly nice turn of phrase, they “want to throw a party every night for the rest of their lives.”
Carmy is at this table, once again agog. This time, though, he is full of anxiety and anger. Across the room is Fields, the Chef of Empire and his demon from above. Carmy cannot stop staring at him. Fields gets up to use the bathroom, giving Carmy the opportunity to confront him.
Things do not go to plan. Fields’ main conviction is that he abused Carmy for his own good, that Carmy was “OK” when he started but “excellent” when he left. The abuse pushed Carmy forward, allowing him to reach his potential. Carmy pushes back, eventually landing on the fact that his “life stopped,” to which Fields replies: “That’s the point, right? You wanted to be great, wanted to be excellent, so you got rid of all of the bullshit and you concentrated. You got great, you got excellent… You made it, it worked.”
Dedication to craft purifies living indeed. Achieving difficult ends requires sacrifice and pain. For many, these sacrifices are only psychologically possible under great deals of orchestrated stress. Fields channels these facts into a mentoring philosophy that orchestrates stress through insults designed to question the talent of the mentee. Once again the proof is in the pudding. Carmy is clearly shaken, even though in one way the conversation gives him exactly what he wants: Recognition of his talent.
The final thread involves Chef Terry, with Olivia Coleman demonstrating her quiet brilliance once again. Carmy feels unmoored by Ever’s closing, seeing Terry as a polestar. They share a private moment towards the end of the meal. He expresses his gratitude for how much he learned. She replies that she also learned a lot: “I learnt that I want to sleep in more, want to go to London more, want to go to a party, want to meet people.” After a beat, Carmy just says, “Live.”
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Thomas Keller, another famous real-world chef, plays a special role throughout the show. Carmy seems particularly attached to him and his groundbreaking Napa valley restaurant, The French Laundry. We often see Carmy in his chef jacket from the restaurant and sporting a Kellerian tattoo on one hand. Season 3’s flashbacks heavily feature The French Laundry. Yet Keller himself doesn’t appear until the last episode, where he gives Carmy a lesson in roasting chicken for the staff meal.
The theme is familiar—ars hospitalis. Keller’s tone matches his message: Nurturing.
On the fingers of Carmy’s left hand are the letters “SOU.” This comes from one of Keller’s mantras: Sense of Urgency. Keller believes, rightly, that creative endeavors are often fueled by the feeling that you’re lying on the edge between great success and embarrassing failure. Keller wants to foster that feeling in his kitchens. He wants to be a conductor of stress.
Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that Thomas Keller is the inspiration for David Fields. Carmy’s SOU tattoo is conspicuously visible as he stares down Fields at Ever’s funeral service.
This throws a new light on the seeming fawning of the cameos. On the surface, Keller is treated as a great hero, a nurturing genius. Carmy himself embodies the man’s mantras. But the show doesn’t let Keller or the culture of fine dining off the hook. In fact, it is aggressively taking aim at Keller himself while at the same time allowing him to personally represent the ideals of restaurant craft. This is an instance of one of the most interesting aspects of the show: Its grappling with the struggle between a dedication to excellence and the pathologies of its pursuit.
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Many crafts are oriented towards virtues. Teaching is oriented towards knowledge and understanding, furniture making is oriented towards the production of functional beauty. Restaurant craft is oriented towards hospitality. Or that’s the story and they’re sticking to it. But the pursuit of virtue is fraught. It is subject to all sorts of distortions—from narcissism to competitiveness to fetishization. Dedication to particular virtues tends to drown out the rest of the world. This can lead to great achievement but can also heighten the distortions. The problems of the pursuit of virtue through craft are on full display in The Bear. So far, the show doesn’t tell us how to feel about them, and it’s better for that.
Errol Lord is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. His scholarly work focuses on ethical theory, epistemology, aesthetics and the philosophy of art. He also writes criticism, primarily on his Substack Critical Chunks. His main website is www.errol-lord.com.
