What The Bear got right – and wrong – about restaurant culture | Canada Voices

From a myopic viewpoint, FX’s The Bear has sparked an abundance of restaurants serving Italian roast beef sandwiches, dripping with spicy giardiniera and jus.

But as someone who has worked for two decades as a restaurant cook, chef, server, critic, reporter and consultant, I think the show has had a more significant impact: helping its audience look beyond celebrated chefs, past their well-promoted cult of personality. It delves into the tension between the chef’s management style, the economic health of a restaurant and the lives of the people needed to sustain it.

Audiences, whether or not they have worked in restaurants, connected with the show’s frank voice about the industry – a dialogue missing a pop culture focus since the passing of Anthony Bourdain in 2018. As the show ends with its fifth and final season, I think it did more good than harm by putting a face on the personality of an abusive chef.

Unless I read this show wrong (were we supposed to like Carmy?), he is the villain. Like any great antagonist, he sees himself as the protagonist of his story. Carmy is not a tyrant who lusts for power or revenge. He’s not a villain in the classical sense, monologuing his justifications in the mode of Erik Killmonger, Max Cady or Lotso from Toy Story 3. He is a chef struggling to achieve greatness, who possesses great skill and passion, but no coping mechanisms except cigarettes.

We all recognize him, a person who has been hurt and abused by family and employers, and who is failing in their leadership role by perpetuating that cycle. The Bear doesn’t ask us to judge him. Between thoughtful writing, patient framing and editing (cinematographer Drew Wehde cites Michael Mann as an intentional influence), and a compassionate performance by Jeremy Allen White, the show helps us understand Carmy and why he treats people so poorly.

In a series high point, a mistake with online ordering causes the kitchen printer to spit out chits at a pace that cranks up the tension to Jason Statham levels. The resulting pressure and how each character deals with it, captured in a bravura 18-minute single shot, is the show’s thesis statement: how a single mistake can bring out the best or worst versions of ourselves. For Carmy, it’s the worst, as he reacts to the scenario by abusing and alienating the very staff he needs to depend on.

Carmy is no Don Draper, an anti-hero who can win back the respect of his peers and the audience with an improvised, charismatic speech and brilliant strategic gesture. He’s a guy who is good at cooking, who has risen through hard work to a management role without acquiring any leadership skills. This is common in restaurants, where a chef can draw acolytes based on their technical proficiency, only to lead their flock into the wilderness.

Carmy has clearly not read Unreasonable Hospitality, the influential 2022 restaurant management book by Will Guidara (a co-producer on the show). It’s no coincidence that he is so demonstrably ignorant of Guidara’s doctrine, which advises to “establish a regular rhythm for giving praise,” and that “a leader’s role isn’t only to motivate and uplift; sometimes it’s to earn the trust of your team by being human with them,” etc.

Carmy is a portrait of the kind of manager Guidara warns us not to be. He is a walking red flag that his protégé Sydney, herself a victim of the deification of chefs, fails to heed. Of course she should quit. But Sydney’s youthful willingness to be abused and exploited is as empathetically rendered (by Ayo Edebiri, another star-making performance) as Carmy’s brokenness.

This was The Bear’s lasting impact – helping audiences see through the eyes of someone they would otherwise only know in a news story that we would tsk-tsk over, but quickly forget.

For example, take the recent accounts from 35 former employees who alleged physical abuse at the hands of Rene Redzepi, who is featured in the show as a benevolent mentor. Since “resigning” from Noma after the allegations of abuse in March, Redzepi has returned under the title of creative director. Reservations sold out immediately.

Anyone who sees their profession or subculture portrayed on screen is going to have notes. Whether you’re a cop, lawyer, journalist or exorcist, you’re going to cringe at some of the narrative shortcuts that misrepresent your field of expertise. Yes, The Bear had those moments.

The show’s depiction of legal contracts seem more based on game shows than employment law. Bourdain would have called the phoniness of a high-end restaurant comping dinner for a pair of schoolteachers as a hollow defence that fine dining is not all about serving luxury food to rich people. A discussion of the problems with tipping is as brief as a Stan Lee cameo.

And the trope of contemporary serialized television writing, where raising the stakes and surprising the audience with season finale twists and switches of allegiance (spoiler: an addict methodically saved a fortune and hid it as treasure?), too often takes priority over the characters.

But for all its faults, The Bear kept people talking about how restaurants work. The show arrived at a moment when the pandemic-era concern for the industry’s systemic problems was waning. The Bear put its foot on the gas of that conversation. I may not have agreed with all the show’s positions, but I appreciate its lasting impact by keeping the subject of restaurants and their workers in the zeitgeist.

Corey Mintz is a Winnipeg-based hospitality consultant, writer and the author of The Next Supper: The End of Restaurants As We Knew Them, And What Comes After