Season 3 bearAs a critic previously said:Interesting, vivid, real” and A realistic, fast-paced look at restaurant life” didn’t do his best this time. The New York Times reported, “The clanging beastVariety magazine said,Aimless” Vulture called the third installment “was locked up“I agree. And it’s food’s fault. “Cooking really takes a backseat this time of year,” Eater writer This Season’s Review“That’s probably part of why it feels so cluttered,” she explains.
In the early seasons, bear It was entertaining because of the culinary intensity. Set in Chicagoland’s Original Beef, the unpredictable world where anything can happen. The Italian beef, smothered in bread, smeared with spicy giardiniera and drenched in sauce, draws you in. When Tina (Lisa Colon-Zayas) realizes she has what it takes to be a serious chef by making mashed potatoes, it makes you want to dip your spoon into the pot. Watching Marcus (Lionel Boyce) make the perfect chocolate cake was a quiet meditation amid the chaos of the restaurant.
So this season has been a long wait for cooking to become intimate and alive. Where are the chip-topped French omelettes that Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) lovingly crafted for a pregnant Nat (Abby Elliott) in season two? What about the doughnuts that Marcus lovingly crafted to a level of precision in season one? What about the explosive, harrowing “Feast of the Seven Fishes,” a traumatic family memory that Carmie Belzatto (Jeremy Allen White) transformed into a masterpiece? In the first two seasons, through the cooking, we learned why someone would want to cook and learn on this team, despite Carmie’s grief and obsessive perfectionism and the dysfunction that swirls around the rest of the staff’s conflicts. The stress of the environment was a byproduct of the love they had for their jobs, and the family bond that forged. But as McCarthy says, “There are no omelets this season. There’s no such thing.” (Spoilers for season 3 follow.)
In season three, there’s no more Chicagoland Original Beef; there’s a fine-dining restaurant called The Bear. And, unfortunately, the food is boring as hell. In some scenes, you can tell the writers wanted it that way: Plate after plate of pretentious dishes are churned out to the refrain of Sydney or Carmy yelling “The door!”, and in flashbacks we see Carmy peeling peas for hours while training at a fine-dining restaurant. It’s a satirical food-porn montage. menuThere’s no consistency or narrative other than, “This is how fine dining works, and this is why we do it.”
Haute cuisine today is often confusing, overrated, and, of course, boring. It can tell a story, but it’s not the only story. Perhaps this season’s cold, formulaic cooking was meant to show viewers that this highbrow world can wear chefs down and sap the joy out of their work. But by showcasing Carmy’s cooking over and over again alongside the cooking of other characters who are inspired by it (newer, fresher, less tired chefs), the show abandons cooking as its main focus.. It’s unclear whether the writers realized that food is a favorite character of many viewers. “A lot of the characters’ storylines are half-baked,” Ahmed Ali Akbar, a James Beard Award-winning food writer for the Chicago Tribune, says of this season, “and food is one of them.”
When food became less interesting, the show followed suit. Instead of a show about cooking and eating bringing people together, it became the same old same old thing. New American Tasting MenuIt reminds me of R.S. Benedict’s essay “Everyone is beautiful and no one is lustfulTalking about the stripping away of real sexuality and sensuality from film, bearall the dishes are beautiful and no one goes hungry (Or excited. However, that’s a different article.
Perhaps worse, no one seems to care. When a newspaper demands that its staff recreate a duck dish for a photo shoot, no one even remembers which duck the paper is talking about, because they made about 10 different versions in a month. Carmy decides to change the menu every day, somehow believing that this way he’ll get a Michelin star and avoid ridicule and ruin. There’s an intimacy without intimacy between the characters and the dishes they frantically make that’s suffocating and uncomfortable to watch. “All that anxiety just feels so unnecessary,” McCarthy says.
As a food writer, my favorite restaurants have a reason for being there and something they want to say. Foraged plants and hunted meat They came from the Ozarks. South Indian restaurant with emphasis on Kerala cuisinethey are your Childhood in the 90s,or Indigenous chef reminds us we should all eat crickets. bear Carmy has no such appeal, no real culinary philosophy beyond a vague pursuit of greatness based on the domination of whimsical white male filmmakers, that doesn’t quite reflect the culinary world we live in today, with its emphasis on tradition, storytelling and sustainability. McCarthy points out that the show has previously moved away from the “Carmy is a genius” angle by “telling the culinary partnership between Carmy and Sydney,” but that’s not on show in season 3.
This season makes me ask: Was it so bad to just do sandwiches? Sandwiches are great, and as a jumping off point for a restaurant, they offer a lot of room for creativity. “I always felt like the exploration of Italian beef, overall, was kind of weak,” says Ali Akbar. “They have whole scenes discussing the philosophy of fine dining, what service is, what cooking is, but they spend very little time talking about what a sandwich means and why a sandwich can be meaningful to someone.”
While the show repeatedly emphasizes that Ebraheim’s exclusive Italian beef stand is their only source of revenue, there’s no real discussion of how that profitability should shape how they should creatively deploy their cuisine. “They’re a little too invested in the idea that all the best treats in the world are also the most expensive, but at the same time, they only see Italian beef as a way to make money,” Ali Akbar points out, adding that he considers Italian beef to be the invention of a culinary genius and one of his most beloved Chicago classics.
The lack of culinary purpose seems to be what makes this season so boring. “Karmy’s culinary philosophy is just like ‘excellence,'” McCarthy says, adding that he thinks he needs to “find joy” to move beyond this kind of obsession with haute cuisine. Ali Akbar points out that Season 2’s Seven Fish dishes and Karmie’s pasta experiments this season show a culinary philosophy rooted in his Italian family, but “he goes to dark places.” [and] He resorts to getting this training from the person he hates the most, a chef played by Joel McHale… and he becomes that person.”
This is a deliberate choice by the writers, but the lack of creative contrast between characters like Sidney and Marcus makes it boring. “You can’t cook fun, creative dishes when you’re miserable,” McCarthy says. “His menus are a poorly explored reflection of his emotional state.” The show’s overt theme that it’s hard and miserable to make it to the top just bogs it down. bear under.
