![]() ![]() If The Bear has a spiritual cousin, it’s probably Anthony Bourdain, whose TV travelogues subverted the model, and whose revelations about the buccaneer antics in so many high-profile kitchens blew food writing out of the water. Even gentler reality fare like The Great British Baking Show is marked by the strutting silence and performative handshake of Paul Hollywood. ![]() The Netflix series Chef’s Table is a psychologically probing celebration of the kind of perverse personality required to turn food into an art form. The kitchen staff resent their new boss, while Mikey’s old friend and employee, the bro-child Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), derides Carmy as an “Eleven Madison Park dickhead.” The Beef is so broke that Carmy has to sell off parts of his vintage denim collection to buy just enough meat to sell just enough sandwiches to make payroll. The restaurant-the Original Beef of Chicagoland-is, Carmy learns, hopelessly in hock to meat vendors, the IRS, even a wiseguy-ish “uncle” who shows up one day and says he’s owed $300,000. The show’s setup is sparse and context is doled out along the way, but it follows Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), a James Beard Award–winning chef who goes home to Chicago to salvage the Italian-beef sandwich shop left behind by his brother, Mikey, who we find out in the second episode died by suicide. The Bear is horrifically stressful it’s also thrilling, ambitious, funny, devastating. The seventh episode, “Review,” is largely filmed in one long semi-sadistic take, weaving in and out of different corners of the kitchen as it implodes. The effect is like living through a real kitchen shift at 24x speed. Storer, who directs five of eight episodes, builds intensity with quick cuts between characters that capture them peeling carrots, or browning giant slabs of beef. A Noma cookbook is brandished with the physical menace of a meat tenderizer. “So much yelling,” I wrote in my notes, followed by “ so so much yelling.” A gun is fired in the first episode. The new FX/Hulu series from Christopher Storer ( Ramy, Eighth Grade) is the antithesis of comfort TV it opens on frenetic chaos and gets messier by the minute. If you’ve ever spent any time working in restaurants, you know the kind of recurring anxiety dream The Bear immediately conjures: packed tables, malfunctioning equipment, orders piling up so fast that the kitchen can’t process them, frayed nerves, incipient breakdown. ![]()
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