There’s a cliche about what it takes to be a rockstar chef. It combines Anthony Bourdain’s aesthetic – arms tattooed, a puckish sparkle in his eye – with Gordon Ramsay’s propensity for swearing at people. Restaurant kitchens are as scorching and vicious as the machismo it takes to thrive in one. To be the best, you’ve got to bleed, bruise, sweat and scream for it. You have to live to cook.
For most of its electrifying first season, The Bear – a show from Christopher Storer (a producer on 2018’s coming-of-age indie-hit Eighth Grade and Ramy Youssef’s celebrated comedy Ramy ) about a ramshackle mom-and-pop Italian beef sandwich shop nearly invisible among the skyscrapers of Chicago’s River North neighbourhood – leans into that stereotype. The kitchen staff’s yelling is so loud and nasty and incessant, I found myself hitting pause just to give my adrenal glands a break. But in the Disney+ series’ penultimate 20-minute episode, “Review”, the ticking time bomb of the lunch rush bubbles over into actual violence. Shot in one long, roving take, the episode explodes the myth of the tortured, erratic genius and the kitchen hierarchy that props up his ego.
