Unless you got lost somewhere in the depths of The Queue and never quite made it back to reality, you’ll be well aware that The Bear roared on to our screens this week. If you haven’t got around to devouring it just yet, here’s what’s on the menu. A tight, white T-shirt-wearing, tattoo-strewn chef with large, forlorn blue eyes, a waft of unwashed hair and a navy apron (character name: Carmy Berzatto. Real name: Jeremy Allen White. And yes, he is 2022’s most unlikely heart-throb) goes from being head honcho at the world’s most lauded restaurant to running his late brother’s Chicago-based sandwich joint. What pans out in the following eight, anxiety-inducing episodes is designed to get your stomach wrenching and rumbling by painting a portrait of what life is really like inside the kitchen, the one aspect of restaurants we very rarely see. While there is love and loyalty, there is also rage, blood, sweat and tears. This is, apparently, a portrayal of the very best and very worst of kitchen culture on both the fine dining and casual ends of the restaurant spectrum.
As a nation that has grown old seeing Gordon Ramsay lose his lamb sauce, the head chef in Ratatouille construct a murder plot and more recently, 92 minutes of Stephen Graham on the verge of nervous breakdown in Boiling Point, the above synopsis might not sound like an entirely shocking portrayal of kitchen culture. However, even the most hardened of viewers would find it difficult to stomach the more strenuous moments of The Bear, which include severe levels of emotional abuse, violence and quotes from sous-chef Sydney including: ‘It was the first time I didn’t have a complete and utter psychopath behind me screaming and pushing.’
