When Day Trip’s co-owners, Stella Dennig and Finn Stern, sat down to watch the first episode of “The Bear,” they didn’t make it five minutes into the acclaimed FX television show about a gifted chef who returns to Chicago to run the family sandwich shop after his brother’s death.
“I think the opening scene showed the main character sleeping on a countertop, which Finn had just done the night before … too close to home!!” Dennig explained.
“The Bear,” which just released its third season in June, has been a hit. With a record-breaking 23 Emmy nominations, it’s clear people are riveted by the glimpse into the grizzly truth of the restaurant industry. After the fictitious family running the restaurant comes into some money, they decide to convert the casual Italian beef spot into a fine-dining establishment and run the sandwich business out of the back. As they wade into the world of prix-fixe menus and Michelin stars, the tension and turmoil boil until the characters are pushed to their limits. Nosh spoke with a handful of East Bay chefs to learn just how close to the truth the show gets.
The best bites from ‘The Bear’
The creators of “The Bear” (the third season is streaming on Hulu) went to great lengths to research the restaurant industry and prepare the cast for their respective roles, including spending time in real kitchens and hiring real chefs to both serve as part of the cast and as consultants.
Several chefs who spoke to Nosh agreed that the show does many things well, including capturing the cast of characters who make the operation run, especially those usually hidden behind the swinging doors.
Geoff Davis opened Burdell in Temescal last fall after working at Aqua, Haven, Cyrus, and True Laurel among others and training at the Culinary Institute of America and, like is depicted in “The Bear,” describes restaurants as a refuge of sorts for workers who might struggle with typical office jobs or more traditional workplaces. Davis was attracted to the career originally because it was a good outlet for a “troublemaking kid.” He said people sometimes think of chefs as these major figures now, in what Davis referred to as the “celebrity chef era.”
“I think a lot of us are drawn to it because we’re just like, weird, antisocial people, and really like working with our hands, and just the adrenaline rush of service,” Davis said.
Sam Ciccarelli, the founder of Urelio’s Pizza food truck, who, after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in New York, interned at Noma in Copenhagen before working at Chez Panisse for five years, got into the career because food has always been a big part of his life. The two lead chefs in the show, Carmy and Sydney, reflect this passion and love for food and drive to bring the best out of the ingredients.
“Food felt like a center point for me, all of these things in my life that I love, food is connected to them,” Ciccarelli explained. “The environmental aspect, gathering with community, creativity, and nourishment for yourself.”
Mark Liberman, the chef and co-owner of Mägo, was drawn to the career by PBS cooking shows of the 80s and 90s, including the “Great Chefs” series. He liked that the program showed real chefs in their kitchens. When he was 11, his dad bought him a cookbook and he was hooked, getting a job at 15 washing dishes and prep-cooking at a little inn by his house.
C-Y Chia, co-founder along with Shane Stanbridge of the now-closed Lion Dance Cafe, had their first restaurant experience under Alain Passard at L’Arpège in Paris. Chia, who is now working on a Lion Dance cookbook, crafting the menu for the new martini bar Tallboy, and still doing pop-ups with Stanbridge, said one of their favorite episodes was in season two when Sydney goes around town looking for inspiration.
“I thought that was one of the more enjoyable episodes with more levity, where you see someone getting to be in their own head and connecting to their creative process,” Chia said. “And it’s very true that it can work that way where you’re curious, you want to see what everyone else is doing and be inspired by that and learn from one another. That was really touching and a lot of beautiful plates also.”
Others said that the show has done a good job of opening the public’s eyes to the stress and pressure of the restaurant industry, and prompted lots of questions at chef’s tables.
“I think people that are not aware of the restaurant life, it definitely opens more peoples’ eyes to that, for all the things like the hours you work and how intense it can be,” said Liberman, who went to the Culinary Institute of America and staged at Restaurant Daniel in New York (where Carmy interns in “The Bear”).
What resonated the most from the first season for Liberman was how the show depicted the crunch for time.
“That’s a very real feeling when you’re prepping for lunch or dinner and you’re just constantly looking at the clock to get ahead,” he said.
In “The Bear,” once the decision is made in season two to revamp the restaurant into a prix-fixe dining experience shooting for awards, the training and intensity ratchet up.
“There’s just such an incredible amount of pressure to not just get stars, but there’s even more pressure once you have them to maintain them. It takes such a toll on industry workers,” Chia said. “It’s no secret that there is, as it’s portrayed in [the Bear], a lot of tension, a lot of screaming, a lot of just genuine violence in kitchens. And I’m not singling out a particular place I worked at. It’s kind of what is observable in general.”
The chefs hope the behind-the-scenes glimpse of the industry has made customers more empathetic and understanding of the hard economics and strenuous environment at restaurants.
“Those are complicated issues and once we as a society can look at them together and not just like, ‘restaurants are expensive. I don’t want to go there.’ But when people realize what goes into getting the food to the plate to you in the show, I feel like it’s bringing a lot of attention to these problems that need solutions,” Ciccarelli said.
Overall, for Ciccarelli, the show feels like a fairly accurate portrayal.
“Specifically, now that they have a restaurant and they’re talking about numbers and ‘oh, we need to do an extra turn, we need to make this happen’ and people being like, ‘We physically can’t do it’ and they’re like, ‘No, but you need to do it.’ Restaurant people are so incredibly resourceful because it’s a hard industry and it’s pretty sink or swim,” Ciccarelli said.
The most anxiety-inducing moments
Like Day Trip’s Stella Dennig and Finn Stern, who could not make it past the first episode, many of the chefs pointed to particular moments that made them squirm with recognition.
“I’ve been fortunate to not be treated as bad as Carmy was, but it still brings back a lot of past trauma and anxiety,” Chia said. “And it was very hard to watch. I had to space out the episodes by a few weeks so that I could just kind of digest them.”
The first episode of season three, through a series of flashbacks, shows Carmy’s training in several kitchens and evolution as a chef. In different kitchens, he experiences varying degrees and styles of highly demanding, sometimes belittling, training.
“I’ve definitely worked in kitchens where there was a lot of abusive behavior but never necessarily as personal as I saw in ‘The Bear’,” Liberman said. “More just getting people to push and push and push in a kind of an aggressive manner, and some of it was in the style of being whispered that you’re not doing a good job kind of thing, and other times it’s been we’re just getting screamed at.”
In the show, the main character played by Jeremy Allen White, Carmy, interns at Noma, which Ciccarelli did in real life. He thought the portrayal hit the right notes.
“It brought me back to that, because I had stood in the same place that he did in the same clothes and with the same people around,” Ciccarelli said.
He also felt the show did a good job of showing what it can be like working in high-intensity kitchens. The attention to detail, the lighting, even the flashbacks that come to you once you leave those kitchens felt familiar. Even the bullying mentality is something that Ciccarelli said he’d experienced in his career, and that those experiences stick with you.
“I’ve had my experiences of it being kind of intense, but also being an intern, you’re more so just witnessing, because you’re most likely there for free. And it’s the people who are the employed ones that maybe get a little more of the negative feedback,” Ciccarelli said.
For Ciccarelli, Chez Panisse made him realize that kitchens weren’t always like this.
“I was in New York, or Copenhagen, working very long days, six days a week, just in the trenches every day, very high intensity, a ton of people like 30 interns at a time,” Ciccarelli said. “Then I went to Chez Panisse and people are asking how something makes you feel and it is such a drastic shift.”
Where ‘The Bear’ loses a star (or two)
While FX has not confirmed it, early reporting from Hollywood indicates “The Bear” will return for a season four, and the chefs Nosh spoke to had some thoughts on how the show could be more realistic, better develop its characters, and drive the story forward.
While the chefs found some parts of “The Bear” to be accurate representations of the industry, there are also times when they feel the show strays too far or loses its foundation in true-to-life experiences.
In season three, as the team tries to get the new fine dining concept off the ground, the show spends considerable time on the day-to-day grind of prep, cooking and service. One entire episode is dedicated to showing a month of business, and the physical and emotional toll it takes on the team.
“Obviously, you’re not going to show a smooth, easy service, but I wish that they would, since they’re trying to be as realistic as possible,” Davis said. “Everyone has a rough one, but on the show, it’s kind of portrayed as like the hardest service I’ve ever had is the normal night for them, which people would quit, that’s not a real thing.”
Ciccarelli hopes the show will draw more interest from the general public on how we can make restaurants more sustainable for people.
“One day our goal is to shift from the truck to a restaurant, and I really want it to be a place where people can work and have a healthy life and take care of themselves,” he said. “Restaurants are the most amazing things, but also really hard on people and seeing the show and talking about this dynamic with people, it just fuels that want for me, of making a space that not only people love coming to, but people also really love working in.”
Chia said many people in the industry now are trying to be better bosses. They want to inspire, create space, and care for their team. In “The Bear,” Carmy is just, “dumping his own trauma all over the place,” Chia said, “that’s not leadership.”
Chia wants the show to do something with all of the trauma it has been depicting in kitchens.
“It’s confusing to me, if they’re actually on the side of restaurant workers or not with this show, because they’re sort of denouncing the toxicity of certain high-end kitchens with scenes like those and at the same time, they’re not showing a different path,” they said.
“I would love to see the main character trying to imagine what it would be like to break this cycle of abuse.”
C-Y Chia on “The Bear”
The show feels a bit exploitive and re-traumatizing, Chia explained, instead of inspiring or healing for industry workers who are trying to be better bosses and better leaders. They also think the show isn’t showing some other issues that happen in the industry.
“I think that in my experience, and not only my experience, how you are treated in a restaurant setting is also very influenced by how you look,” Chia said. “Your skin color, your gender, how you present, and I don’t think that’s really being framed realistically, either.”
Davis echoed Chia’s sentiment. “[The show] kind of doubled down on the idea of [terrible workplace culture], instead of fighting against it, which was kind of disappointing to see, especially as someone that’s worked in fine dining and has seen some of these things go down,” Davis said. “We actively try to not include that level of, I mean, really narcissism into our place. So I was disappointed to see that the show kind of gave them an unbalanced platform.”
Davis and Chia also were both disappointed that the show gives cameos to various chefs who are celebrated in real life but also known for horrible workplace culture in their own kitchens. As examples, Chia offered Noma’s Rene Redzepi, who has admitted to contributing to the cycle of abusive environments in kitchens and seeking therapy to help reform, and Thomas Keller, who has faced allegations of running a “heartless” operation at his New York restaurant Per Se. In 2023, a lawsuit was filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Keller’s Las Vegas restaurant Bouchon, in which employees said they faced retaliation after reporting accusations of sexual harassment and a hostile work environment.
“I would love to see the main character trying to imagine what it would be like to break this cycle of abuse,” Chia said.
It’s not a documentary 🤦🏾