Last weekend, while I was binge-watching Bros. restaurants, The bear Playing with kitchen tongs and exchanging “fuck yous” back and forth, I found myself lost in thought about an actual restaurant, Bros’—punctuation intended. As the story goes, in the fall of 2021, a writer named Geraldine DeRuiter and her friends sat down at this Michelin-starred restaurant on the stiletto heel of Italy. They were all looking forward to a night of cool, weird gastronomic bliss. And in a way, that’s exactly what they got: a culinary experience that transcended the confines of our earthly plane.
Dinner at Bros, DeRuiter would later recall in a viral and vividly photographed essay about his evening, was one of “those She didn’t mean it in a good way, and what’s more, she didn’t mean it in a bad way either. “I’m not talking about a poorly cooked meal, or a waiter who might be planning your murder,” she wrote. “Those kinds of things happen in the big fat end of the bell curve of evil. Instead, I’m talking about things in the long tail—the kind of meals that make you feel like the fabric of reality is unraveling.”
Over four and a half hours and some 20 courses, there was “an oyster roll that tasted like Newark airport,” and “a marshmallow that tasted like cuttlefish,” and “a dish called ‘frozen air’ that literally melted before you could eat it, which seemed like a fucking metaphor for the night,” DeRuiter wrote. And that was just one-ninth of it all.
According to the Michelin Guide, which first awarded Bros’ its (their?) star of distinction in 2018, “Bros’ is synonymous with a young, free spirit, full of creativity and imagination,” a place where “two tasting menus of 20 to 25 small dishes…can be ‘tracked’ in advance via a QR code.” According to DeRuiter, “there is no menu at Bros. Just a blank newspaper with a QR code leading to a video in which one of the chefs, presumably against a black background, speaks directly to the camera about things that have nothing to do with food.” And according to one of those chefs, a brooding millennial named Floriano Pellegrino who defended himself against DeRuiter’s dispatch by issuing a clip-art “Statement” Today’s show This involved, among other things, existential reflections on the canon of equestrian art: “The contemporary artist asks you to think about beauty, to doubt yourself, to trust his creative process, to follow his ideas. This is how revolutions are born.”
Anyway, like I said, I remembered all of this while I was catching up on the third and final season of The bear.
Over the course of its three seasons, FX’s acclaimed and award-winning Hulu series has charted the evolution of a Chicago family restaurant from a spicy beef joint called The Beef to a high-end restaurant with lofty ambitions called The Bear. Created by Christopher Storer and starring Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, the show’s plot and tone have always focused on exploring the full range of temperatures in professional kitchens: the hot tempers and lukewarm receptions, the icy cults of personality and the cold hard cash.
That’s why an odd duck like chef Floriano Pellegrino – who “loves the F-word so much that he used it on the boxes of his Christmas panettones,” according to The New York Times—would fit perfectly into the show’s crude, metaphorical mix of elite chefs, some fictional, others thinly veiled, many simply playing themselves. And that’s why an eccentric, high-flying company like Bros’, which is described on its website as “blending avant-garde cuisine with a deep connection to its local roots,” isn’t exactly that Unlike Carmy “The Bear” Berzatto’s new release, which includes a list of “non-negotiables” like “location” and “constantly evolving through passion and creativity,” at Bros’ and The Bear, one thing is for sure: When you sit down at your table, you have no idea what you’re going to get or what it’s going to taste like.
Just as Bros’ serves that fish marshmallow (?), The Bear offers his mortadella cannolis and a “caviar sundae.” For all his quirks, Pellegrino has earned that sweet, sweet Michelin star in real life; Carmy, meanwhile, is obsessed with getting one, much to the detriment of himself and all his co-workers. (And also the viewers, who are ultimately left hanging on that front in Season 3.) The Michelin blurb for Bros’ notes that many dishes are “finished with a touch of drama at your table,” and in The bearServers are assigned tableside tasks, such as pouring clear, steaming consommés onto a pristine mirepoix. (On the one hand, the deconstructed-reconstructed soup resembles that of a bomb; on the other hand, every time I see it, I think of that kind of tweet that says: “It’s a bus. You invented a bus.”) The bearThese servers sometimes mess up their work, even when following instructions; in DeRuiter’s review of Bros, an exchange between a server and a diner involved the phrase “rancid ricotta” and read as if it could have been performed by one or more of them. The bearThe clumsy Fak brothers.
Ah, the Faks, the fucking Faks, the perfect segue into the other reason I watch The bear This season reminded me of Bros and its ilk. It’s not just that the details of this ambitious and objectively absurd Italian enterprise can be compared to The Bear, the fictional restaurant. It’s that they have parallels with The bear the series too.
As a creative project, The bearThe show’s three-season run had an arc worthy of its flashy food industry subject matter. The show arrived in 2022 with a fresh, clean point of view and a cool collection of talent that was on the cusp of breakout success. It was instantly the streaming equivalent of a hip booking, and having watched it was an indicator that you got it. Some people can grab two trendy tops at seven; others can point to their TV screen and say: Yeah, I used to drink juice out of plastic pint containers too, back when I was a waitress. Wow!
The first two seasons of the show were a joy to watch; watching them was like getting a wink from the bartender and a little amuse bouche on the house. There was a little something new in every episode, even for the most ardent and demanding of regulars—an experiment with form, perhaps, or a cameo bursting with depth and flavor—but there was also the comfort of knowing that you could turn on the show and expect good kitchen slang and lingering shots of juicy meat every time. The show received critical acclaim and multiple Emmy Awards, which are like the Michelin stars of television.
This season, however, sit down to watch The bear I felt like I was having a bad night at Bros. Everyone wants to enjoy the best-in-class meal they’ve been looking forward to, but it’s hard to ignore the signs that the magic isn’t there: the sloppy execution, the reliance on too many Tuesday surprises, that hint of complacency that dominates the dish. So much fuss over plating, so much proud refusal to simply play the hits. Charm can be hard to build, and lately, so much of what’s improved The bear in small doses early on—the celebrity cameos, the moody Carmyheimer montages, the snappy, layered yapping between supporting characters with long histories and short fuses—are so thick they’re a little boring to swallow.
“Too stuffed and not cooked enough” is how it is THE New Yorker put it on; “a roaring, moaning beast,” determined THE New York Times. “If I have to hear the Fak diaspora talk about “haunting” again, I’m going to lock it down myself in this walk-in closet,” he thought The ringKatie Baker. This season, in a tortured attempt to chase laurels and dodge problems, Chef Carmy has relied too much on his big ideas (new menus every day?!) and too much on his big ego. Likewise, The bear seems to have reacted to its great success by losing, this season, the ability to taste its own cooking.
Rereading the message from DeRuiter’s brothers, what struck me most was that she wasn’t even angry; she was just disappointed. Her writing is full of growing disbelief and even despair, of course, but you can also sense all the polite chewing, the sheer restraint. Her painful reaction to the various lumps, swabs, and droplets infused with meat molecules placed before her was not It was one of those many instances where a novice doesn’t enjoy watching an Iris van Herpen couture show; nor was it one of those situations where a Twitter engagement farmer riles people up by bashing Rothko. She was an enthusiastic regular who seemed perfectly familiar with the quirks and realities, sliding scales and acquired tastes for bits and dabs in the global restaurant industry, from small mom-and-pop shops to haute cuisine.
Yet she always knew that what he had been given to put in his mouth was very weird. Or I guess I should rearrange this to say: the mouth that had been given to himI’ll let DeRuiter tell the story of the course he was given in a particularly custom-built ship:
Another dish, a citrus mousse, was served in a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth. Lacking utensils, we were asked to lick it from the chef’s mouth, in a scene that I’m pretty sure was lifted from an Eastern European horror film.
Sorry, I kind of went off topic on that part, huh? Luckily, there’s a reason for that: despite all their recent struggles, the fictional restaurant The Bear and the very real TV series surrounding it have yet to reach such a level of idiotic narcissism.
The show still offers plenty of perfect bites on ordinary plates: like every scene between Sugar’s normie husband and her volatile mother, or every examination of how hubris and self-sabotage can drive a wedge between creative and romantic partners, or every little moment where Tina smiles to herself or Richie adorably messes up his pep talk at the family dinner or Ebraheim manages to keep The Beef’s original legacy not just alive, but thriving. The bear still captures the promise and ruin of an industry that is fueled by a mixture of hustle and precision. It still demonstrates, somewhere in every episode, the frustrating reality that once you take a bite of something, it’s gone, that once you’ve earned that Michelin star, you have to keep hustling to keep it. A new table, a new storyline, a new season, a new bite – the difficulty of The Bear’s and The bearThe job of ‘is that they have to constantly renew their contract.