FX
Early on in season one of The Bear, as Carmy struggled to wrap his head around losing Mikey and all the chaos that followed, he went to an Al-Anon meeting where Molly Ringwald (the show’s first guest star of arguably way too many) delivered a speech about her relationship to her husband’s alcoholism that seemed to land with our li’l restaurateur: “You can’t curb that kind of chaos until the thinking changes, until the foundation changes, until the chemistry changes,” she says, later adding, “It made me realize that the best thing for me to do is to try to keep my side of the street clean. Instead of trying to fix anything, I just remove myself from any situation that is or could become toxic.”
Which is to say that, even though a lot has changed in the world of the Original Beef crew, Carmy is still fundamentally where he was at the show’s inception. We might know him better — his background, his family, his flaws, and his motivations — but that doesn’t mean he knows himself better. Everyone around Carmy may have grown or mellowed or started to strive more, but he’s still a little stuck, and until that somehow changes, it seems pretty clear that The Bear (the restaurant) is going to be stuck as well.
There are hopeful signs in the season-four premiere, though, that Carmy might be able to turn his piercing gaze inward sometime in the not-so-distant future. It won’t be easy — it’s clearly simpler for him to drown in work than it is to take time off, or to say nothing rather than talking about himself — but if anything can shake something loose in Carmy, it’s the restaurant’s Chicago Tribune review.
It’s already made an impact on Richie, who steps up to admit that he agrees with some of the reviewer’s critiques. If throughout last season it seemed like everyone was tiptoeing around Carmy’s mania in hopes of earning success and acclaim for The Bear, the review proves that what they were feeling in the back of house was translated to the dining experience. If they want to get better — to get the Michelin star Carmy confidently (foolishly?) believes they can achieve — they’ll have to both support and stand up to one another, committed to the idea that The Bear isn’t just the manifestation of one person’s vision and success, but rather the culmination of the whole team’s drive.
It should be clearer than ever to the whole crew that Carmy isn’t The Bear’s hero. He’s the face and the hands and the guy with enough experience to generally steer the ship, but that doesn’t mean he’s some savior. It doesn’t even mean he’s good at business. And if you’re Carmy, none of that should come as news, really. It might feel like a harsh toke — no one likes to be reminded that they’re not as skilled as they think they are — but Carmy has been brimming with self-hatred since season one, episode one. His time with Claire put a balm on it, but he torpedoed that quick enough. I can only hope we see Claire again this season; while she’s certainly not obligated to fix some fucked-up man, it does seem like she’s one of the few people who’s capable of getting Carmy to actually slow down and take a breath.
From the opening scenes of the premiere, it seems like Mikey used to be able to do that, too, before he started using and the brothers’ relationship went to shit. He might have been bad at the rental-car business, but he understood people and, like Carmy, he understood restaurants. We’ve heard some version of Carmy’s spiel about the importance of restaurants a number of times over the run of The Bear, including in the season-three finale from a cavalcade of big-name guest-star chefs. Restaurants, the show likes to remind us, are the settings for so many of our biggest life moments. They bring families and friends together. They’re places where we can turn off our brains for a minute, and they’re places where we can go to feel less lonely. (They’re also places for immigrants to gather and to find work and solace, which I like to hope the show will find a way to acknowledge this season, but that remains to be seen.)
The most important new information in this scene comes from a different bit of Mikey and Carmy’s conversation, though. As they two discuss their absent dad, we learn that he loved a shitty Irish bar and grill called Kerrigan’s, which Mikey says “smelled like a dumpster.” Carmy says when their dad was there, it was the only time he was remotely happy, and there are more allusions to him being, if not dead, at least somehow cut out of all their lives. While I tend to think the show has at least generally implied that he is dead — why else would Cicero not have seen him in 20-odd years? — this intro conversation at least suggests we could see him sometime this season, whether in a flashback or in person. I can see the show calling on some stunt casting if they do decide to give Senior a little screen time, but my dream would be to see someone like Chicago local and Ghostlight standout Keith Kupferer in the role. He’d be a perfect foil/bestie to Oliver Platt’s Cicero, and his gruff exterior and general Chicago ruddiness would really sing in the world of The Bear. (Also, if you like The Bear and you haven’t seen the exceptionally good Ghostlight, what are you doing, really? Get on that.)
Both The Bear and The Bear have always functioned best under a looming clock, and uncles Cicero and Computer deliver a big one this episode. It may have taken three months to turn The Original Beef into The Bear, but now that it’s up and running, with a middling to mostly good review, the uncles say the crew only has two months to start turning a profit. While hiring the erstwhile crew from Andrea Terry’s recently shuttered shop seems to be a good step toward righting the ship, the show appears to be setting up the question of “Is it too little too late?” Will Chuckie the delivery robot be enough, or was the Original Beef gang always doomed because they were starting from some metaphorical level below other successful restaurants? (Tina and Marcus might have really taken their culinary training to heart, but in most successful Michelin-star joints, you’ve got a whole crew full of people who have been working at that level for years, if not decades.) I have a hard time believing that The Bear would ever really fuck over our onscreen pals given that their scrappy perseverance is the whole heart of the show, but the stakes this season are pretty evident in that big clock. The season is just getting started, but it looks like the end may already be in sight.
Small Bites
• If anyone’s working toward completing some sort of “eat everywhere mentioned on The Bear” quest, you can now add Homer’s to the list. A Wilmette, Illinois, ice-cream shop that’s been open since 1935, Homer’s has 60-plus ice-cream flavors on deck, plus burgers, fries, and all sorts of other tasty options. Personally, after a quick look at its menu, I’m going for a double dip of Caramel and Prairie Berry, which is described as “an award winning combination of strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and red raspberries.”
• Sugar says Richie’s flower budget is out of hand, to which Richie retorts, “Blame it on my elegance.” Bless his gruff little heart.
• Another great Richie line that I happen to agree 100 percent with: “If someone stands up, do not fold the napkin. This is not a passive-aggressive establishment.” I’ve always found that move so off-putting. Can I live?
• And since we’re talking restaurants and I have nowhere else to vent this, if I were ever to do a Las Culturistas “I don’t think so honey,” it would be directed at servers who say “Wow, looked like you really liked that,” when they take away your empty plate. (See also: “Wow, I guess you hated that, huh?”) That kind of language instantly makes me feel like I’m gross or greedy for eating what was on my plate, and that’s certainly not hospitality, as far as I’m concerned. I love, love, love restaurant workers, but man, has that single line made me feel like shit more times than I can count.