Occasionally, Olive Garden does, in fact, send some of its kitchen staff to a restaurant in Tuscany to learn the finer tastes and techniques of Italian cuisine. I’m sure corporate does this to very marginally improve the food coming out of the Olive Garden, yes, but also because the legend of Chef Neri and Riserva di Fizzano sounds good in the press clips and TV commercials. But the Original Beef of Chicagoland sends its pastry chef to Copenhagen in earnest. In Season 2 of The Bear, the hit series about a rowdy sandwich shop in Chicago’s hectic River North, Carm and Syd rush the upscale launch of the show’s namesake restaurant in a shaky investment deal with Carm’s loan shark uncle, Jimmy Cicero. The launch requires an extensive and troublesome series of renovations in and around the kitchen, so for most of the second season we, as viewers, have to get our food porn outside the restaurant.
The Ringer’s Streaming Guide
There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.
This brings us to an intriguing couple of episodes, “Honeydew” and “Forks,” the fourth and seventh installments, respectively, of the second season. Both are heavily concerned with secondary characters and largely staged off-site. In “Honeydew,” Carm sends his enterprising pastry chef, Marcus, to Denmark to work for some unspecified period at a well-regarded restaurant with a challenging menu. Based on his experience there, Marcus is expected to develop three new desserts in time for the launch of the Bear. In “Forks,” Carm sends his restless elder play-cousin, Richie, elsewhere in Chicago to work front of house at “the greatest restaurant in the world,” a buzzy three-star gastro-something-or-other with interior design and staff protocols both reminiscent of the Death Star. The two restaurants share a staff mantra, “Every second counts,” and they were both earlier waypoints in Carm’s own culinary career (which is why “Every second counts” is also the prelaunch mantra that Carm scribbles on the countdown calendar at the Bear). The two restaurants also stage some of the most significant developments of characters and themes in the series so far.
In Copenhagen, Marcus lodges on a boat docked on a picturesque waterfront. Each morning, he walks across the canal to shadow the young but nonetheless experienced pastry chef Luca. Initially, Luca seems cold and exacting. He’s got Marcus arriving at 10 before 5; he’s working his nerves with little sighs and terse feedback (“Nope. Again. Worse.”) on Marcus’s anxious, ham-fisted handling of a delicate pudding. With time, however, Luca proves to be a mensch who earned his evident calm and self-assurance once, ironically, he understood that he’d never outperform one former colleague, who’s strongly implied to be Carm. The restaurant in Copenhagen turns out to be a place where Marcus can hear, for once in his life, some constructive criticism and positive reinforcement. We never see Marcus working a busy dinner service here. He spends his afternoons and evenings in the city strolling cobblestone streets, snapping photos, sketching recipes, and chatting with Syd via FaceTime. This isn’t a vacation, but it is a relief. None of these characters deserve the rough treatment to which they often subjected themselves at the Original Beef, but Marcus in particular, in the first years of his relatively late start in the culinary world, needs a cooler head and a steadier hand than Carm and Syd typically provide in the heat of the moment. In fairness, I, too, lost my mind watching Marcus still fussing over those goddamn doughnuts while his colleagues were clearly in agony during the infamous to-go order meltdown in last season’s penultimate episode. But he needs someone to nurture that whimsy in him, to develop that curiosity into talent.
“Forks” is similarly uplifting—in fact, I’d go so far as to say “Forks” is a better episode of Ted Lasso than Ted Lasso ever made. Earlier, I said Richie works front of house in his stint at a fancy Chicago restaurant, but he actually spends most of the week in a kitchen jacket, in the back, shining forks and bitching and moaning, as always. Richie’s meticulous supervisor, Garrett, repeatedly urges him to stop swearing and start taking the stakes of fine dining seriously: “I need you to respect the staff, I need you to respect the diners, and I need you to respect yourself.” It’s really that last part, I need you to respect yourself, that strikes Richie as a dare. So Richie suits up. Garrett sends him into dinner service, which is more like high-wire espionage for the waitstaff at this particular establishment. And Richie lives for this shit. His residency climaxes with him eavesdropping on a table and conspiring with the kitchen to serve the guests a deconstructed deep dish pizza fresh from Pequod’s—a very thoughtful and hugely sentimental gesture from a character who until now has sulked and snarked his way through the series.
Initially, Richie assumed Carm sent him to the restaurant as either punishment or distraction, blind to the possibility that Carm really does see great potential in him as the indispensable one-man front of house who remembered everyone’s faces, names, and orders at the Beef. His transformation from disillusioned dickhead to happy warrior in “Forks” is admittedly abrupt, as if facilitated by the suit itself, though it makes more sense viewed in light of the previous episode, “Fishes,” an hour-long flashback that shows Richie at his wits’ end, begging Jimmy for a job as he fears he’s already squandered his potential. On his last day at “the greatest restaurant in the world,” Richie has a heart-to-heart with the head chef as she peels a boatload of mushrooms in the kitchen’s off-hours. This isn’t her first restaurant, Chef Terry tells Richie. The last place was a massive failure. But, she says, “it’s never too late to start over.”
Chef Luca and Chef Terry both talk about peaking early and succumbing to youthful arrogance. Terry’s restaurant isn’t without problems—“the smudge” is driving everyone nuts—but they’re mitigated by everyone’s best attempts to maintain dignity and accountability in the face of those problems. When Carm makes everyone at the Beef call each other “Chef” while they’re otherwise loudly berating and backstabbing each other, it isn’t that—it’s a parody of that. In the season finale, “The Bear,” at the grand opening—spoilers—things fall apart somewhat in the kitchen. Carm gets locked in the walk-in fridge, nearly grinding service to a halt. But then Richie steps up and synergizes with Syd, after so many months of angry bickering between the two, to get an otherwise hopeless backlog of orders to the window.
Ultimately, the opening night is a success, even if other developments bring Carm and Marcus to new lows in the setup for Season 3. The work is still brutal, and life is even harder. But “Honeydew” and “Forks” give these characters, and us, glimpses into kitchens where every criticism isn’t a menacing echo in someone’s head, and where every problem isn’t the end of the world. “Every second counts” isn’t just some do-or-die regimental taunt—it’s another way of telling these chefs to savor their time. That’s how Chef Terry’s father meant it as the sign-off in his military journal, in his entries about palm trees and escargot and the ocean. That’s what the mantra might ideally mean for the Bear, as Carm struggles with Syd to turn the place into something better than the three-star purgatory that terrified him. The Bear could very well be a place where everyone has one another’s backs, even when the pudding isn’t quite right or someone keeps smudging the plates. And when you’re here? You’re family.
