How The New TV Show 'The Bear' Makes Food A Main Character
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From the second you start watching The Bear, the new FX show about a young fine-dining chef who inherits a Chicago sandwich shop, you can feel the stress in the kitchen. Carmen ‘Carmy' Berzatto, played by Jeremy Allen White (you know him as Lip from Shameless) gets up early, scrubs the floors, and argues with his newly acquired kitchen staff who don’t like his organized ways.
Things are tense as Carmy sears a huge chunk of top roast, and quickly chops onions, carrots, and celery. All this happens with the tik, tik, tik of a clock in the background, counting down to opening time. You wait in anticipation for something bad to happen—a burned hand, a sliced hand, or dropped pan.
“The physical aspect is really shown in the show—carrying things around, loading up the sheet trays,” said Courtney Storer, the series' culinary producer. “You can see it illustrated in the pace of the show but you also see it in the volume, the size of things—constantly searing, constantly picking it up, constantly slicing or whatever. It is to show that redundancy. It's a daily thing.”
Food and kitchen work aren’t just in the background. They are supporting characters. They induce fear, show anger, and demonstrate character growth. When sous chef Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) is angry at Carmy and the rest of the kitchen staff, you can tell by how she chops onions. You feel the fatigue Carmy feels as he the monotonously lugs around heavy steel bins full of juicy beef. When someone on staff needs a moment to themselves to emotionally cool down, they head for the walk-in freezer.
“The walk-in tends to be the place where you will just go in, close the door, and take a deep breath,” Storer said, whose brother is show creator Christopher Storer. She, along with co-producer Matty Matheson (he plays a repairman who gets paid in sandwiches), wanted the kitchen scenes to feel as authentic as possible.
You hear kitchen lingo like “corner,” “heard,” and “yes, chef.” You see chefs taste everything before serving. You notice the way the actors carry things around. “In the kitchen, you're not carrying things to the front,” Storer said. “You're carrying it to the side so you can use your other hand as kind of shield.”
Storer was involved in the creative process from the beginning. She was in the writer’s room making sure the correct jargon was being used. She was on set, ready to advise actors on how to hold a knife or grab a hot pan. At first, Storer said she might let the actors do something unlike how most real-life kitchen staff would. But then she would show them the correct way.
A perfect example of that is in the first episode, when Carmy is trying to push his staff to move faster with a more organized ordering system. Around the kitchen, you can see mustard splatter, onion peels, a cracked egg on the floor, and a greasy work station. But a few episodes later, as they find their groove, the kitchen is clean and the characters move with ease around each other, efficiently keeping up with orders.
“We wanted to illustrate that, at first, this team overlooks [the mess], and Carmy’s like, ‘I gotta pick my battles to have this team respect me,’” Storer said. “We wanted it to feel messy and stressful.”
And of course, like all restaurant shows, the love of food is front and center. Lionel Boyce, whose character Marcus falls in love with pastry, turns into an artist when making chocolate cake. You hear the sprinkle of the sugar, the gentle movement of the whisk, the tender push of the offset spatula.
“I talked about getting lost and how he can use the offset spatula almost like a paintbrush,” Storer said. “[His character] made the chocolate ganache frosting perfect, and he knows it. I told him to let the frosting do the dance. That's how we got that shot.”
The Bear is full of gritty, messy, anxiety-inducing kitchen scenes, along with gorgeous, delicious, hunger-inducing ones, too. The show will make your stomach grumble and turn at the same time. All eight episodes of the first season are available on FX and Hulu.
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