Food is no longer a main character on The Bear

Season three of The Bear, the Hulu darling that critics previously called “funny, raw, real” and “an authentic, breakneck look at restaurant life,” did not bring its best this time around. The New York Times deemed it a “clanging, wailing beast,” Variety said it was “aimless,” and Vulture declared the third installment “trapped.” I agree — and I blame the food. “The dishes have really taken a back seat in this season,” Amy McCarthy, a writer for Eater who recently reviewed this season, explains. “That’s maybe part of why it feels so messy.” In its early seasons, The Bear was exciting because it had culinary oomph. The setting was the Original Beef of Chicagoland, an unpredictable world where anything could happen. You were drawn in by the Italian beef, cuddled in bread, smeared with spicy giardiniera, soaked in jus. When Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) discovered she had what it took to be a serious chef by making mashed potatoes, you wanted to dip a spoon in the pot. Watching Marcus (Lionel Boyce) perfect his chocolate cake was a peaceful meditation within the chaos of the restaurant. So this season, I kept waiting for the food to get intimate and come alive. Where was the French omelet that Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) lovingly made for pregnant Nat (Abby Elliott) in season two, with potato chips on top? Marcus’s doughnut he lovingly toiled on to a level of precise excellence in season one? The explosive and disastrous Feast of the Seven Fishes, a traumatic family memory that Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) repurposed into a masterpiece? In the first two seasons, through the food, you understood why someone might want to cook and learn with this team, despite the dysfunction that swirled around Carmy’s grieving, obsessive perfectionism and the rest of his staff’s conflicts. The stress of the environment was a byproduct of the love they had for their craft, and it forged a family bond. But, as McCarthy says, “There is no omelet this season. There’s none of that.” (Spoilers follow for season three.) In season three, it’s no longer the Original Beef of Chicagoland. It’s a high-end restaurant called The Bear. And the food is, I’m sorry to say, mindlessly boring. In some scenes, you can tell the writers want it to be that way. Plate after plate of pretentious dishes are sent out to the refrain of Sydney or Carmy shouting “Doors!” or seen in flashbacks, like one where Carmy shells peas for hours while training in a high-end restaurant. It’s a montage of food porn à la the satirical The Menu, with no cohesiveness or narrative at play other than “this is what fancy restaurants do. That’s why we are doing it.” Today’s fine dining is often confusing, overrated, and, yes, boring. That can be a story, but it’s not one by itself. I get that the cold, formulaic dishes of this season were probably meant to show viewers that this rarefied world can grind down its chefs and disconnect them from the joy of the work. But by presenting Carmy’s dishes again and again with few others from the more culinarily inspired characters — chefs who are newer, fresher, less jaded — the show abandons food as a main character. I’m not sure the writers realized that for many viewers, food was their favorite character. “Many characters have half-finished arcs,” Ahmed Ali Akbar, a James Beard award-winning food writer at the Chicago Tribune, says of this season. “And the food is one of them.” When the food stopped being exciting, the show followed suit. Instead of being a show about how cooking and eating bring people together, it became like the same old New American tasting menu fare. It reminded me of the RS Benedict essay “Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny,” about the stripping of authentic sexuality and sensuality from film. Except in The Bear, every dish is beautiful and no one is hungry (or horny, for that matter but that’s a different article). [Image: The Bear has no real culinary philosophy besides a vague pursuit of greatness, based upon the reign of one mercurial white male auteur. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/07/Bear-E301_Still002_db6874.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Perhaps worse, no one seems to care. When a newspaper wants the staff to replicate a duck dish for a photoshoot, no one can even remember which duck dish the newspaper is talking about because they’ve made about 10 different versions in a single month — Carmy decided to change the menu every day because for some reason, he believes this will earn them a Michelin star and not ridicule and ruin. There’s a closeness without intimacy, both between the characters and between the dishes they break themselves to make, which is claustrophobic and unpleasant to watch. “The anxiety of it all just feels gratuitous,” says McCarthy. As a food writer, my favorite restaurants have a reason for being there and something to say. Maybe they serve foraged plants and hunted meat from the Ozarks, maybe they’re a South Indian restaurant with a hyperfocus on Keralese cuisine, maybe they want to evoke your ’90s childhood, or maybe the Indigenous chef wants to remind you we should all be eating crickets. The Bear has no such draw; no real culinary philosophy besides a vague pursuit of greatness, based upon the reign of one mercurial white male auteur. It’s not at all reflective of the culinary world we currently live in, one that cares about heritage, stories, and sustainability. McCarthy points out that the show had previously gotten away from the “Carmy is a genius” angle by “talking about the culinary partnership between Carmy and Sydney,” but we don't get that in the third season. This season brings me to the question: What was so bad about just doing sandwiches? Sandwiches are great, and as a starting block for a restaurant, they have so much room for creativity. “In general, I’ve always felt like the Italian beef exploration has been kind of poor,” says Ali Akbar. “They have whole scenes discussing philosophies about fine dining, what service means, what cooking means, but they almost spent no time with what a sandwich means or why a sandwich can be meaningful to somebody.” The show keeps reminding us that the Italian beef window run solely by Ebraheim is the only thing making them money, but there’s no real discussion of what that profitability means about where they should go creatively with the food. “They're leaning a little too hard on the idea that the best treats in the world are all the most expensive ... but at the same time, the Italian beef is just seen as a way to make money,” notes Ali Akbar, adding that he thinks Italian beef is an invention of culinary genius and one of the classic Chicago dishes he’s most in love with. The lack of culinary purpose seems to be why this season is so ... boring. “Carmy’s culinary philosophy just seems to be ‘excellence,’” McCarthy says, adding that she thinks for him to move past his obsession with this kind of fine cuisine, he needs to “find some joy.” Ali Akbar points out that the Seven Fishes dish in season two and Carmy’s pasta experiments this season do point to a culinary philosophy rooted in his Italian family, but then “he goes to this dark place [and] relies on this training from the person he hates the most, the chef played by Joel McHale ... And he becomes that person.” Yet again, it’s an intentional choice by the writers, but one that grows weary with no real creative counterpoint from characters like Sydney or Marcus. “You can’t do that fun, creative cooking when you’re miserable,” says McCarthy. “His menu reflects his emotional state in a way that isn’t really explored.” The show’s apparent thesis — that it’s hard and miserable getting to the top — is exactly what is dragging The Bear down.