I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been to a true fine dining establishment. Not some generally upscale trend spot with interior design straight out of an Urban Outfitters, but the real expensive stuff. The kind you can only justify going to once a year when it’s your birthday and your sister is covering the bill because you did the last time, for her birthday, and despite agreeing to make this an annual tradition, it’s actually too expensive even for that, and in fact you haven’t been to one again in several years. The $300 per meal kinda place. The kind of restaurant Carmy decides to transform his dive sandwich joint into over the last couple seasons of The Bear.
The Bear is a good show. It’s always been a good show, and it remains one. I don’t know that it was ever a great show, but that’s neither here nor there. Rather, in its third season the show surprised me. Where at the start I’d thought The Bear had a serious critique to make of the class dynamics involved in the world of fine dining, it turns out it was just about trauma all along. When the show begins, Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto leaves the universe of Michelin-star restaurants to take over the Chicago sandwich shop left behind in the wake of his older brother’s suicide. He finds The Beef in a sorry state, loaded with debt and unable to run with any kind of efficiency. The trauma plot kicks in quickly, fueled by the interpersonal dynamics of working in a high-pressure kitchen—see: a lot of yelling—but embedded in it, as Carmy was forced to reckon with his new, seemingly lower station in life, appeared to be an examination of the lives of the working class, or even working poor, in an extractive, exploitative system.
Though The Bear may be about the working class, its view of systems is superseded by its respect for the product that is fine dining. It’s an itchy feeling I had a little early on, admittedly, but which started to rankle in Season 2, and then finally began to truly bother in its third. The third season’s finale is set largely at another lavish fine dining restaurant and features extended cameos by numerous famous chefs from that world. Throughout the episode, several of them share their personal traumatic experiences working their way up to the very pinnacle of culinary achievement, the validation of their efforts. This is set against a long-awaited confrontation between Carmy and a chef he once worked under, in which it’s made clear that the real problem here is some people think being an asshole is just a good way to run a kitchen.
In the year 2024, it’s no great statement that people should be kinder to their workers, or that running an establishment built on mutual respect is the worthier goal. It’s an altogether thornier matter to take a look at what the actual aims of a business are. Who does it serve?
For several decades now, foodie culture has been remarkably pervasive. Cooking shows, which were once daytime programming aimed at women and stay-at-home moms, became aspirational advertisements for a world of culinary adventurism that few will ever experience. People know what Michelin stars are now. They’ve been exposed to the wondrous deconstruction of chefs like Wylie Dufresne and witnessed the inner workings of the finest of fine restaurants. The viral popularity of documentary series like Chef’s Table have made even bigger celebrities of the culinary world’s great successes. Growing up watching Iron Chef, I was certainly aware of what supremely talented chefs were capable of, but where the Japanese competition was a display of raw creative talent, the emergence in the West of shows like Top Chef: Masters and Chef’s Table built a myth in my mind about the possibilities of the dining experience.
I think about one birthday, when I went with my sister and my mom to David Chang’s now-shuttered Momofuku Shōtō, the most upscale of his Toronto complex of restaurants. With limited kitchen counter seating observing the chefs at work, we had a genuinely marvelous time. The food was great, and the experience was unique for us. My mother, who I believe had never in her life eaten at a restaurant so fancy, appeared by equal measures confused and delighted by the details of the service and the tasting menu itself. My sister and I, who’d months earlier eaten at the similarly positioned Canoe for her birthday, and who were more aware of the manner and etiquette of fine dining, acted in what looking back I’d deem was a haughty superiority. Here, our mother, the lowly woman unaccustomed to luxury, and us, her children, acting like this ultra-expensive restaurant was our rightful domain. Because we’d seen some food shows and watched Ratatouille too many times to count, I suppose. Because we knew what a Michelin star was, though at the time the Michelin Guide had not yet visited Toronto.
In one of The Bear’s very best episodes, Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Richie, the manager of The Beef and friend of Carmy’s late brother, is sent to work for a week at a fine dining restaurant of the kind Carmy intends to build. It’s an opportunity for the often caustic Richie to be humbled by a restaurant run with deep precision and respect. His knee-jerk anger at having to wipe forks down for an entire day gives way to an admiration for what the workers there are able to accomplish, both as a team running the show, and in their service to their patrons. What they’re providing is an experience for people, and in the delivery of that experience they discover their self-worth. All the difficulties in the life of a chef, all the trials over years, the exploitation, being berated by superiors, the injuries, all of it made meaningful by service toward the customers. Glossed over a little is who they’re actually serving. At hundreds of dollars per meal, it’s meant to be a moment of great humanity when the restaurant comps the meals of one couple who the staff have learned are teachers who’d been saving up to eat there for years. No attention is paid to the fact that they had to save up for years in the first place, and what that says about the rest of the clientele.
I remember that time I went to Canoe with my sister. Located on the 54th floor of a tower in the heart of Toronto’s financial district, the well-regarded restaurant serves precisely crafted dishes inspired by the very landscape of Canada. The tasting menu we ordered was impeccable. At one point during that meal, though, I wondered at the scale of the place, which was pretty massive for a downtown establishment where rents are high. I thought about the fact that people like my sister and me could not possibly sustain their enterprise with our once-in-a-blue-moon fancy night out, all dolled up, pretending we were rich for a day. Looking around the wide expense of the restaurant, I could see the truth. It was full of people for whom a $100 lunch is just another daily charge on their expense account. Those were the people to whom this highly exclusive space belonged, and my sister and I were merely interlopers allowed access at great personal expense to help bolster the aura of that exclusivity. Have you ever been to Canoe? Oh, once. It was so special. We ate things you wouldn’t believe, and the service, it was divine.
In recent years, there has been much reporting about the conditions of working at these kinds of restaurants. Chefs worked to the bone to produce fancy food for rich people in what many are realizing has never been a sustainable manner. Former chef Genevieve Yam wrote for Bon Appetit last year about the glory days of fine dining beginning to wane in light of major restaurant closures and revelations of behind-the-scenes toxicity and exploitation. Noma, the iconic Copenhagen outfit—the inspiration for another restaurant seen in Season 2 of The Bear—announced its shuttering for regular service at the end of 2024. Chef René Redzepi explained he’d been burned out, that he just couldn’t sustain the lifestyle anymore. This came on the heels of revelations about how Noma was actually run, in many ways on the backs of unpaid interns. It was only months after they actually began paying the interns that the impending closure was announced.
Toxic workplaces are in no way limited to the world of upscale dining, or dining at all. It’s well understood by now that small business, the mom-and-pop shops we all love so much, are often the most toxic environments of all, being run at the whims of their on-the-ground owners without the internal oversight that often comes when businesses grow to a certain size. All of that is bad. But there’s something particularly sickening about spending the better part of two decades, as Redzepi did, earning a reputation as one of the greatest, most creative chefs in the world while utilizing an army of unpaid workers creating absurdly elaborate dishes for the world’s jet-setters. One wonders about the environmental impact of all the private jets landing in Copenhagen for the sake of a meal at Noma.
I believe cooking can be an art, and I believe what these chefs do with food is something close to a miracle, not unlike a great statue or novel. In a more just society I think there is still space for cooks to pursue their passion with unbounded creativity, pushing the art of food to new places. Still, I’m wary of the ethics involved when access to that art is primarily the realm of the ultra-rich destroying our world. The value in beauty seems outweighed by exploitation inherent. I thought, early on, that this was something The Bear was ready to tackle. It turns out, the show was never about that, content instead to have a chummy relationship with the high-flying world it depicts. Much of the third season is punctuated by Carmy and his staff learning about other big fine-dining restaurants closing their doors. The entire finale acts as a moving elegy for such restaurants, the joys they bring to their patrons, and the life lessons they’ve given the workers who passed through their doors. It’s pure tribute, right down to the cameo appearance of one Wylie Dufresne. Rather than inspiring introspection about the moral sustainability of those businesses, the show expresses simple mourning for their loss. It’s so hard to keep a restaurant afloat on low margins and long hours, of course, especially in the post-pandemic environment. Not mentioned: how many of those restaurants have had to close due to staff now refusing to work for low wages in a tight labor market after many back-of-house workers literally died from communicable illness while preparing Uber Eats orders for the rest of us.
The Bear includes a sop to the lowlier people. When Carmy opens his restaurant, called The Bear, he also uses part of the available space around back to reopen The Beef as a smaller window-service establishment. That’s where the plebs go. The people who used to populate the space in a part of Chicago that looks like it’s seen better days. The people who just want a good Italian beef sandwich and could probably only ever dream of stepping foot through the main entrance of Carmy’s great endeavor. The Bear, indeed, sticks out like a sore thumb in the show’s establishing shots. Like a perfect symbol of the worst in gentrification, and to the show’s credit, I believe it’s aware of this. I also suspect that when the show comes to a conclusion, The Bear will close and The Beef will return, Carmy having found some measure of peace in running something downscale. I can’t necessarily predict what’s to come on the show, but even such a gesture in my estimation would feel slight—like that comped meal for the poor teachers—without a more serious on-screen reckoning with the truth about fine dining: that the problem is not a toxic boss, but a toxic world in which the rest of us bust our asses for the rich and get only tokens in return if we’re lucky.
The traumas of life are very real, and The Bear’s exploration of them through its characters is often as rich as you will ever find on television, but there’s something darker and more troubling at the heart of what the series puts on display that it seems reluctant to deal with head-on. I thought about it every time a frustrated Carmy threw a dish he was working on in the trash, and I thought about it every time a chef sliced a finger open, and I thought about it when the older Somali cook Ebraheim couldn’t hack it at culinary school so he could work the main kitchen, and was instead given the job of running the sandwich shop in the back. It’s a question not of the value of service toward others, genuinely one of the great undertakings to which a person can devote themselves, but of who is being served, and how, and to what end.
