You’ll want to eat up wild restaurant drama ‘The Bear’
There’s no chaos quite like the chaos in the kitchen.
Your home kitchen probably has its fair share of splatters and disasters, but the real delirium comes from the world of restaurants, a favorite setting for TV shows that’s full of high stakes, hot flames, sharp knives, big personalities and bigger egos.
Much TV dedicated to the world of professional chefs takes the form of unscripted competition series, from “Top Chef ” to “Chopped,” but Hulu brings the speed, stakes (and steaks) to its new half-hour FX drama “The Bear” (streaming Thursday, eeeg).
Set at a family-owned steak sandwich joint in Chicago, “Bear,” created by Christopher Storer (“Ramy,” “Eighth Grade”), is all form-follows-function, a feverishly fast and furious series that mimics the frenetic atmosphere of a restaurant kitchen.
Starring Jeremy Allen White (who played “Lip” Gallagher on Showtime’s long-running “Shameless”), “Bear” is
nerve-wracking and a delight. The frenzied pace and the shouty, freewheeling dialogue create an intense, stressful atmosphere that reaches out from the screen and practically tenses your shoulders. But it’s also about (mostly) likable people trying to do their best, and that striving energy is as addictive and satisfying as a really good sandwich.
White plays Carmine “Carmy” Berzatto, a classically trained, award-winning chef who leaves the kitchens of the best restaurants in the world to run his family sandwich shop after his brother dies by suicide. With a resentful staff, mounting debts and a kitchen that’s often literally falling to pieces, Carmy tries to keep Original Beef of Chicagoland afloat and “elevate” it just a little bit toward the restaurants of his early career.
Carmy is resisted at every turn by his late brother’s belligerent best friend Richie (Ebon Moss-bachrach, perfectly cast) and helped by eager young chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) a like-minded lover of haute cuisine. While spending most of his waking hours at the restaurant, Carmy also makes half-hearted attempts to deal with the trauma of losing his brother, encouraged by his sister Sugar (Abby Elliott).
For fans of reality cooking shows, there is a kind of payoff in watching “Bear.” The writers waste no time in the densely plotted show explaining terms like “two mortadella all day” or “stage chef ” (pronounced sta-hhj). We’re plopped head-first into the world without a breather or an introduction, and this lack of accessibility is an immersive experience as if the Original Beef of Chicagoland was a fantasy kingdom like Westeros or Middle Earth. “Bear” sweeps us away to a very specific slice of the world (and slice of beef ). Keeping its inner workings accurate and somewhat unknowable makes that world feel all the more real.
Central to the realistic atmosphere are the many specific references to Chicago life and culture and a pitch-perfect soundtrack of alt-rock and punk that feels like it’s scoring the hectic insides of Carmy’s mind.
Fans of “Shameless” know White’s work is ferocious and full-throated, and he makes an appealing if very flawed protagonist. The real standout of the series is Edebiri (a star and writer on Apple TV+’S “Dickinson”), who starts out as a supporting character in the narrative and the hierarchy of the restaurant. But when Carmy’s eccentric genius isn’t enough to save a floundering business, it’s Sydney’s smarts that often get food on customer’s tables.
Even if you never understand what the heck a “French Brigade” has to do with making beef sandwiches, it doesn’t really matter when it comes to enjoying the meals “Bear” is serving.
It’s all pretty delicious.