The show’s depiction of toxic restaurants can be unsettling, but the series encourages us to love the complicated characters who bring them to life.
In the finale of The Bear’s second season, the pastry chef Marcus, played brilliantly by Lionel Boyce, carefully hangs a sign on the kitchen wall that reads “Every Second Counts.” In a non-restaurant setting, the mantra might stand as a healthy reminder of the preciousness of life, but in a restaurant, it’s a reminder of the tyranny of time. The camera cuts to a shot of panicked messages from his mother’s nurse. We learn later that she passed away on the restaurant’s opening night while Marcus was helping to perfect a dish of savory cannoli with mortadella mousse, pistachios, and trout roe.
In a real restaurant, tragic circumstances like these wouldn’t be so unusual because chefs (and all staff, from the general manager to the porter) often spend more time with their work families than their real ones. It’s an occupational hazard of the service industry. In the end, Marcus takes solace in having been surrounded by his restaurant family when his mother died. “I think that’s how it was supposed to be,” he tells Carmy, the show’s tortured chef, played by Jeremy Allen White. “Like she wanted me to be with y’all.”
I had a similar feeling nine years ago when I lost my uncle on Christmas Eve. I was on my way to work a lunch shift at Carbone in New York City, where I was waiting tables at the time, when my phone rang. It was my aunt telling me that the doctors didn’t think my uncle Robert, who’d battled cancer for three years, was going to make it through the night. Robert was my Mikey—Carmy’s deceased brother who haunts the show in flashbacks, played by Jon Bernthal. I was standing on the street a few blocks away from the restaurant when I took the call and, with fire engines whirring in the background, I said a final goodbye to my big brother.
Anyone in most other jobs would have gone home at that point, but restaurant people are accustomed to working through pain. There was a lot of tough love at Carbone, not too different from the kind you see in The Bear, but, like Marcus, I found comfort in being surrounded by my fellow goombahs who ran things in the dining room. After lunch was over, one of the sous chefs offered to make me a pasta from the menu. Before I finished my bowl of linguine with clams, I got a message that my uncle was gone.
The Bear can be difficult to watch for people with traumatic restaurant backgrounds. Having survived ten years working for Mario Batali, whose history of abusive behavior helped spur a tectonic shift in the industry’s attitudes toward workplace harassment, I’m particularly sensitive to anything that sensationalizes toxic restaurant culture. The “Yes, Chef” T-shirts aren’t as cute when you understand the harm that can be inflicted by bad actors demanding to hear the same common kitchen refrain. But after watching all three seasons of The Bear consecutively over the course of a week (I had delayed my viewing for the reasons cited above), I experienced an unexpected emotion. The show made me realize, in a very heartfelt way, how much I missed my restaurant family.
The forced intimacy of a restaurant often causes the characters in The Bear to test one another’s loyalty, much like real families.
Despite all the frenetic scenes of kitchen mayhem, The Bear is about family more than it is about restaurants. Beneath the surface, every character in The Bear suffers emotional congestion caused by their disjointed family history. Carmy struggles to cope with his brother’s death. Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) is down on his luck after an acrimonious divorce. And Sydney, Carmy’s streetwise sous chef played with quiet intensity by Ayo Edebiri, like Marcus, lost her mother at a young age. Whether they realize it or not, the main characters in the show rely on their restaurant family to fill the void in their personal lives.
The forced intimacy of a restaurant often causes the characters in The Bear to test one another’s loyalty, much like real families do. After Carmy gets locked in the walk-in cooler during the restaurant’s friends-and-family preview night, he gets into a shouting match with Richie through the locked door. “You’re not my fucking family, all right?!” screams Carmy. Even though the family calls Richie “Cousin,” it’s only an honorific. He isn’t really related by blood.
As the argument escalates, Richie tries to drown out Carmy’s responses by repeatedly yelling, “I fucking love you!” in a childish, sing-song manner that makes the two sound like bratty siblings bickering in the back seat of a Subaru. Even when the characters lob insults and obscenities at each other, we never doubt that beneath it all is genuine love, or at least deep respect.
Often in The Bear, we see how restaurant hierarchies mimic real family dynamics. When Richie and Fak (Matty Matheson) argue over whether they should move the lockers to peel the paint off the walls, Fak summons Carmy’s sister, Natalie (the sweet-to-a-fault “Sugar” played by Abby Elliott), to mediate. “You just called Mom?” Richie says. In a stern, motherly tone, Sugar steps out of the office to break up the fight and, like an exhausted caretaker, tells the kids to shut up and move the lockers. This parent-child dynamic is common in restaurants, where managers often feel the need to discipline their staff, and the staff, in turn, resents “Mom” and “Dad” for being too strict.
While the show celebrates one restaurant family’s imperfections, it also exposes how others can be destructive. The most disturbing examples come early in the first season, during flashbacks of Carmy working for chef David Fields (Joel McHale), a megalomaniac who peppers him with insults while he expedites the line. “You are bullshit. You are talentless,” Fields snickers, while Carmy struggles to keep his composure. In real life, aspiring young chefs like Carmy are easily trapped in toxic situations like these.
I’ve been stuck in the doom loop myself—including enduring years of abuse at the hands of Batali’s lieutenants at Babbo—where a healthy paycheck comes to seem like it’s worth the cost of your dignity. Like unloved children, we often overcompensate by trying even harder, hoping that our unfit restaurant family will someday love us back.
Carmy later confronts Fields at the “funeral” for his mentor’s restaurant on its final night of service (Andrea Terry, played by Olivia Colman). The exchange feels oedipal—a grown-up Carmy emerges as the emboldened son who’s made something of himself, finally mustering the courage to confront his tyrannical father. But Fields dismisses his accusations, insisting that he mistreated Carmy only to help him become a better chef.
We can see that Carmy tries to resist running his own kitchen like Fields, but when chefs are trained in such dysfunctional environments, the abuse becomes hereditary. Throughout my career, I witnessed so many young, mild-mannered sous chefs who were kind toward everyone on staff until they were promoted to chef de cuisine and then turned into belligerent dictators like the chefs they had replaced.
It’s easier to forgive these transgressions when we see how tension can turn into tenderness with time and toil. When Sydney first arrives to stage in season one, Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), the hardscrabble line cook with a dramatic, family-oriented backstory that weaves through the show’s three seasons, hazes her like the new kid at school, sabotaging her prep work and ignoring her instructions. But over time, they develop mutual respect, including kindhearted moments where Sydney mentors Tina on proper technique for building pasta sauces and plating dishes. The deep connection that you develop with people you’ve worked with in a restaurant—itself an acute form of Stockholm syndrome—is something only people who’ve worked in those environments can understand.
Often in The Bear, we see how restaurant hierarchies mimic real family dynamics.
My restaurant career is over now. I was forced into early retirement when I lost my job at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. In my new life as a writer, I spend most of my time staring at a computer screen, which isn’t nearly as exciting as tasting an earthy premier cru Burgundy from Michel Lafarge that the sommelier just opened or having a bite of the seared foie gras with lacto-fermented plums the chef is putting on the tasting menu.
I still miss the thrill of being triple-sat (when a waiter’s section fills with three tables all at once) on a busy Saturday night. I miss family meals, even the awful ones with rubbery, overcooked chicken thighs and wilted romaine salads drowning in cheap vinaigrette. I miss them for the joy of communing with my coworkers every night, swapping war stories and gossiping about last night’s drama. Restaurant life took its toll on me, but, no matter how hard things got, I never felt alone.
In the episode titled “Legacy” in season three, Carmy recounts to Marcus what it was like to work with legendary (and nonfictional) chefs like Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller. “They would talk a lot about legacy, like who they would work with and what they would go on to do,” Carmy reflects. “Something would start somewhere, and people would take that thing and then bring it somewhere else. So all these parts of an original restaurant would end up in a new restaurant, and then new people would take those parts, and the whole thing would happen over and over again.” Marcus thinks about this for a moment. “Like a family tree or something?” he asks.
What makes The Bear so special is how it shows us that, even while a restaurant’s inner life can be toxic, we can still love the resilient and colorful people who bring it to life—the way they love each other, in spite of the cruelty. The true miracle of restaurants like the one in The Bear has nothing to do with culinary achievement; it’s that somehow the family tree bears fruit even when the soil that nourishes it is sometimes infertile. Great chefs like Boulud and Keller know—and it seems the producers of the show do too—that a restaurant’s legacy isn’t about the food, it’s about the people.