Rick Bayless Says ‘The Bear’ Set Restaurants Back 20 Years
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The Bear is one of the most critically acclaimed shows on TV, with many chefs giving it props for its accurate portrayal of the kitchen environment. But not all chefs are on board with the ways in which the series depicts the restaurant industry.
Rick Bayless, the Chicago restaurateur behind Frontera Grill, bashed The Bear during a conversation at The Wall Street Journal’s Global Food Forum, Eater Chicago reported on Friday. During a chat with the newspaper’s business editor, Jamie Heller, Bayless said he thought the show pushed back the industry another 20 years.
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“If you’re a mother of a teenage boy that’s watching that show and he goes, ‘Mom, I want to work in restaurants,’ would you let him?” Bayless asked. “No you wouldn’t. That’s like the worst profession in the world.”
Bayless went on to defend working in kitchens, pointing out the good aspects of the industry he thinks The Bear leaves out of its fictional portrayal. “It’s a profession,” he said. “It’s something that you can work for years and years, and you can work your way up ladders and you can learn craft and you can make a life for you and your family.”
Given how much viewers love the show—created by Christopher Storer and starring Jeremy Allen White as a chef who leaves behind his fine-dining background to take over his family’s Italian-beef shop—it’s not surprising that Bayless’s comments have stirred the pot, with people on social media calling out the chef. But Bayless told Eater that he didn’t intend to cause such a hubbub.
“I am trying to point out that how we portray the restaurant business in pop culture is important,” he told the outlet. “Trying to convince people that our profession is not only a viable but positive choice is hard to do when pop culture portrayals and new media coverage only focus on exaggerated negatives.”
He went on to say that he’s never worked in a restaurant where staff acted badly, and while that may have been his experience, the mistreatment of workers in the restaurant industry has been long documented. The Bear is perhaps just shining a new lens on that truth—and riling some people up in the process, as good art tends to do.
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