The Bear ...

A brief review and a survey of chef movies, what to watch and what to avoid.

Not too long ago, a subscriber asked if I might comment on The Bear. Hulu’s hit show concerns a Michelin-starred chef who returns to his home town, Chicago, after his brother, who ran a sandwich joint, commits suicide. The reader wanted to know my thoughts, given that I’ve spent countless hours covering Michelin-starred kitchens. This world matters to me and I hate it when Hollywood gets the work of a chef wrong (about which more below).

And I love it when a movie gets it right. The best movie about the restaurant-kitchen ethos, chef ethos, is Ratatouille, even though it is animated and fanciful (a mouse who becomes a chef in a famous Parisian restaurant?). Highly recommend if you haven’t seen.

Now comes the The Bear and, in Season One, it gets that kitchen ethos right.

“I liked it,” Adam Platt told me. Adam was the long time restaurant critic for NYMag and his brother, Oliver Platt, plays a critical role in both seasons (more about him in a minute). “It really gives a good sense of the pressure cooker atmosphere, really conveys the anxiety.”

True that. What I loved most about Season One is that it takes the ethos of a demanding high-end restaurant and lays it on top of ratty sandwich shop in Chicago. And the show does get it right—the sense of urgency, how filthy kitchens can get, continuous shouts of “Corner!” and “Behind!”

The kitchen wall in the restaurant per se. These words and many others that I’ve written happily appear in the show.

The high-end chef who comes home is Carmy, and he’s played beautifully by Jeremy Allen White, conveying both the anxiety and intensity required to do the work. He went to culinary school to train—love that. He knows how to hold a knife. He is a credible chef because of it.

Here’s something that did not work for me.