For restaurant lovers, "The Bear," a new FX series about a pressure cooker of a professional kitchen in Chicago, is full of cute little nods to the industry. There's Sydney's resume which has her experience at the city's Michelin-starred Alinea purposely at the top. There's not one, but two Noma cookbooks in the kitchen — "Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine" (2010) and "The Noma Guide to Fermentation" (2018). One of the cooks stumbles on a James Beard Award certificate haphazardly tucked in one of those cookbooks.
But my favorite culinary easter egg is also one of the series' most prevalent and consequential. Stacked throughout the kitchen, on shelves and under counters, are little pyramids of canned San Marzano tomatoes. Everywhere you look back-of-house, there's a can or six. While initially they are just seemingly part of the background, these canned tomatoes eventually take the spotlight.
