What ‘The Bear’ Teaches Us About Life and Food and Restaurants

From Sandwiches to Spirituality

Warning: mild spoilers for the first three seasons of the FX show, The Bear

Melanie and I started watching the FX show The Bear a few months ago. The Bear is a wildly acclaimed show about a restaurant in Chicago that transforms from a sandwich shop into a fine dining place populated by a crazy cast of characters. The writing is incredible, the acting is intense, the direction and music and design and everything about the show is great. We love it. There are three seasons so far and they've won whole boatloads of awards.

I've worked in several different kinds of restaurants in my life, mostly in my teens and 20s. I've worked in a mall-based fancy sandwich shop (think croissant sandwiches and soups and frozen yogurt). I've also worked as a dishwasher in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant in the same mall. And I've worked in a McDonald's in a different, bigger mall during Christmas break during college. (Christmas!) I feel like I've seen things.

The Bear feels real. Not that I've ever worked fine dining or that it was as crazy as what we see on screen, but probably a lot of what we see on a lower scale: The quirky crazy chefs and their friends who pop in to the kitchen to hang out and the funny waiters and the stressed-out Saturday nights and the bizarre customer stories. I remember the time the other dishwasher called out sick on a weekend night and I was on dishes by myself. But I had already asked the chefs if I could leave a bit early after close because I'd been invited to a party and now with the other kid out that plan was shot. I didn't complain and cry and moan; I just put down my head and washed dishes and pans as fast as I could. At one point I had every dish in the joint stacked up in front of me. I was going as fast as the washing machine would let me. And at the end of the night, when it was time for me to do all the closing work, the chefs just told me to take off, they'd finish it for me. They respected my work ethic and attitude. I will never forget it and I will always be grateful. (I'm also glad they let me go because that was the night I probably saved my sister from an assault; a story for another time maybe.)

Anyway -- The Bear. What's fascinating after watching 2 and a half seasons of the show is that one of the things it's about is our relationship to food. As a Catholic, I know that food has a deep spiritual meaning for us. When we gather around the table to break bread, we are gathered in community, *in communio*, in imitation of the Lord at the Last Supper with His Apostles. The central mystery of our Faith, the source and summit of the Faith, is the Eucharist, the Lord becoming food for us. It is my opinion that the whole reason our bodies get energy by the consumption of food is so we could receive the Eucharist someday. The Lord could have made us so we absorb sunlight like the plants or something, but instead we put sustenance in our mouths and masticate it and make it part of us in a visceral and intensely incarnational way.

In The Bear, there are two attitudes toward food. Mikey Berzatto is the original owner of the sandwich shop, when it was called The Original Beef. We learn in the first episode that Mikey committed suicide and left the shop to his younger brother, one of the top fine-dining chefs in the country. Mikey's attitude toward the shop and the food is that it's a vehicle for his encounters with people. He loves people. He's garrulous and a big personality. He's always got stories of crazy adventures and the people he's met. He acknowledges that the Italian beef sandwiches are good, but they're not the point of The Original Beef. He's certainly not in it to make money as the restaurant is barely afloat.

Then there's Carmy, the younger brother who takes over The Beef and transforms it into The Bear. He is all about the food. We see that he is constantly playing with ingredients and making dishes, pushing himself to create ever more elaborate, exquisite, sublime dishes, ones that will win awards and make people ooh and ahh. When a dish is made in his kitchen during service, if it doesn't meet his exacting standards, he will toss it in the trash, even if the patron has been waiting forever for it. And it's not because he cares that the patron has the best possible meal. It's because the food is an end in and of itself. The food exists to say something about Carmy. The restaurant isn't there to provide food, entertainment, and celebration to the diners or even a living to the workers and owners. It exists as a vehicle to showcase the ever-more elaborate food, to win awards and acclaim, and to reflect back on Carmy, probably to prove to his satisfaction that he is indeed the chef that others have proclaimed him to be and that some have declared he is not (such as the complete jerk of a previous boss who was the most evil person you could imagine).

I hope that one day the show will give Carmy the epiphany he needs so he can realize that his brother Mikey was right that the food exists for the people, not the people existing for the food. But Carmy is also right that the food itself is important, (although I hope he also learns to be less wasteful of it.) It's funny that it is Richie, Mikey's best friend who worked at The Beef and has become the front-of-house manager at The Bear, who has undergone the biggest transformation of the show. Richie gets it. He understood at The Beef that the customers came first, although he treated them in the rough, of-the-streets style that he knew, and now at The Bear it is his more refined style (more... not completely) that the customer still comes first, that the restaurant exists to serve the diners, to ensure that everything is oriented toward their special experience. Carmy needs to learn from Richie.

Melanie and I have four more episodes to catch up on the third season of The Bear and then hopefully many more future seasons. As I said, this is an incredibly well-crafted show that will be very influential on future TV shows and I look forward to seeing where this goes.