I’m doing series now, apparently. My first post on The Bear is here.
Dedication to craft purifies living. Crafts in the old fashioned sense (ars if we’re being fancy) are human activities requiring a high degree of skill. Often they are institutionalized and highly regimented—think of the workshops of the Old Masters or scribes of Medieval monasteries. This is partly instrumental. The products of craft often require extreme levels of time, concentration, and effort. This can only be obtained through maniacal dedication. This dedication isn’t always—or even often—instrumental for the participants, though. They often take the life of craft as worthwhile for its own sake.
The last few centuries haven’t been kind to many crafts. The various technical revolutions in the last 150 years have killed off many and replaced them with mass produced consumer goods. Of course the products of great skill are still valued, but largely for economic reasons. This often hollows out the meaning of craft.
One craft that has vastly grown in prominence is cooking. Indeed, it is the craft that plays the widest and deepest social role in the modern world. We have never been more invested in skilled cooking, both at home and especially in restaurants. Despite being a notoriously difficult business that imposes a taxing, unhealthy lifestyle, restaurants are born and die constantly. There is a seemingly bottomless well of passion for the restaurant.
The Bear interrogates this passion. On the surface, it doesn’t seem sympathetic. The show is full of the downsides; crazy schedules, working conditions that push one to the brink, terrible business environments, and when it’s going well, a huge demand from a steady stream of strangers. Most of the show seems to be arguing that restaurant culture is pathological.
almost better without context
The character list of The Bear is dominated by the Berzattos—especially Carmy, Mikey, and Natalie. Behind them, though, are two characters from outside the biological family. Sydney, who becomes Carmy’s partner in craft, and Richie, who was Mikey’s best friend and one time partner in craft (such as it was).
In ‘Fishes’, a flashback episode before Mikey’s suicide (more here), all of the Berzattos are worse off compared to the present. Richie, on the other hand, is much better off. He still has Mikey, despite the obvious cracks in his psyche. More importantly, he is in sync with his beloved—the newly pregnant Tiffany. The only calm scene in ‘Fishes’ captures a loving conversation between the two in Donna’s outlandishly Rococo bedroom.
Richie’s life is on the upswing in ‘Fishes’. The vast majority of The Bear so far shows Richie bouncing from low to low. Mikey is gone and he didn’t give the restaurant to Richie. Instead, he gave it to Carmy, who, from Richie’s perspective, is a ‘weird little dude’ who became famous with the wrong people in order to show up Mikey (partly right). He also lost Tiffany and is struggling to be a decent father. Both strands tie him to the restaurant and to Carmy, who is fully committed to employing the crew from The Beef. Richie needs Carmy; he has nowhere else to go.
also better without context
Let’s not get carried away with ars-talk. While decent and hardworking, the cooks at the local Applebee’s are not producing anything akin to exquisite tapestries or preserving a millennia’s worth of the written word. The are not working in temples to ars. Some restaurants, though, are more like monasteries or workshops. They are formal, regimented, and precise for the sake of producing exceptional products. They are deeply serious.
This is the world Carmy has just come from. He conquered its hierarchy. He internalized its logic—everything in the kitchen should clean and organized; the tape should be cut using knifes, not torn; the pots and pans should be at a 45° angle on the stove during service because ‘every second counts’. It also left him deeply scarred. The pressure was intense to the point where he’s not actually sure he’s so good.
is the asshole real?
As many people are, Richie is skeptical of the pretensions of ‘fancy’ restaurants. He is constantly making fun of Carmy for it (see above). This is despite the fact that he knows that Carmy’s food tastes better. He never dislikes something Carmy makes. Yet, he is skeptical, probably because it is very easy to be skeptical about elevating food to art—a word derived from ars.
In the episode immediately proceeding ‘Fishes’, Richie is forced to stage—intern—at an unnamed Chicago restaurant that is referred to by the front of house (FOH) manager Garrett as the best restaurant in the world. Richie is convinced that Carmy is making him do it just to get him out of the way. In his first scene, he struggles to get out of bed at 5.38. As he goes in for the first time he says, ‘fuck you, cousin.’
He is assigned to shining forks. He asks if every stage has to shine forks his whole first day. Garrett tells him that that is the stage assignment for the first week, and if they are lucky, they can then move on to spoons. As he checks the last fork of the day for streaks, he repeats ‘fuck you, cousin.’
Still, the next day his alarm clock goes off at 5.35 and he exits quickly. He eyes show more purpose while shining as the rest of the kitchen prepares for the day, always with precision. The day after that his hand immediately slaps the alarm at 5.34. But day 3 is regressive. He finds out Tiffany is engaged again. Rather than giving it to him straight, she does it lovingly, even telling him that she loves him. That does not help. He also bristles at the restaurant’s seriousness, which leads to he and Garrett having a heart to heart.
doing it for its own sake
Day 4 he is out of bed with purpose at 5.32. He gets a lucky break and Garrett decides to let him trail him. He finally gets to see the restaurant in action. The ranges from the absurd—lamentations about a wasted 47 seconds over a 'smudge’—to the touching—the restaurant comping the over-the-top meal for two teachers simply because they want to ‘blow their fucking minds.’
By day 6 his world-view has expanded. He can see why people drink the kool-aid. He offers himself to Garrett and the restaurant and is nicely turned down. He sadly says that he his needed elsewhere. He comes in for his final day unsure about how he should move forward. Looking for the cutlery polish, he runs across the previously unseen chef of the restaurant, chef Terry. This is none other than the Queen herself, Olivia Coleman, who delivers a quietly brilliant 5 minutes.
chef’s kiss
What Richie learns is that the food is a conduit for the restaurant’s real aim—hospitality. Hospitality is more likely to be associated with midwestern niceties or the Holiday Inn than true virtue these days. This has not always been so. As anyone who has read Homer knows, hospitality can be no joke. Graciously extending yourself to strangers is a mark of respect for humanity. An 18th century philosophical encyclopedia describes it as ‘the virtue of a great soul that cares for the whole universe through the ties of humanity’ and says that ‘the just measure of this type of beneficence depends on what contributes the most to the great end that men must have as a goal, namely reciprocal help, fidelity, exchange between various states, concord, and the duties of the members of a shared civil society.’
In a montage scene designed to show Richie’s conversion, he is reading Will Guidara’s book Unreasonable Hospitality. This is partly just one of the show’s many flexes designed to demonstrate how plugged in they are to restaurant culture. Guidara is the co-founder of Eleven Madison Park and has leveraged this success to become a sort of hospitality guru (TED talk, if you dare). I have not read the book but its marketing does not make me want to. The first sentence of the blurb is ‘Today, every business can choose to be in the hospitality industry.’ No Homer here.
We can interpret this detail as the show expressing more ambivalence about even this deeper ethical calling of the restaurant. Hospitality is a virtue and it is admirable to cultivate it through restaurant craft. This might even vindicate the absurd obsession over a smudge. Having an institution dedicated to taking care of people through food is worthy of a life project. But it can also be hijacked by capitalism and instrumentalized. I’m sure Guidara has sold quite a few books since ‘Forks’ was originally aired. Let’s not celebrate that. Let’s celebrate Richie finding a vocation in ars hospitalis.