The Bear is as much a restaurant as it is a psychological canvas, a culinary dreamscape but also the site of so many waking nightmares. You could be casually eating the best omelet that anyone has ever made back in that kitchen, or you could be getting stabbed in the ass. You might get a server who seems to have been trained by SEAL Team Six, or you might get Matty Matheson pouring seltzer into your lap. You take your chances.
The restaurant and its perpetually anguished staff have transformed so much, so many times over, in the show’s previous three seasons on FX. The fourth season is out later this week, and in the meantime, it’s worth breaking down the state of the stations.
Front of House
The Beef was a restaurant for people on their lunch break just tryna grab sum’n-ta-eat. The Bear is a must-try for people who need to load at least three Eater articles and perhaps also a magazine restaurant profile before they can even begin to have a short list for dinner reservations. Carm and Syd are the chefs elevating the cuisine, sure, but Richie has elevated the ambience and, indeed, dressed for the job he wants. He’s really classed up the joint.
But the dining room is still a somewhat underutilized—and at times mismanaged—section of The Bear. The Fak brothers have collectively become the second-most polarizing characters in the series—we’ll discuss Claire in a bit—careening from comic relief to cartoonish distraction, culminating in the strangest of the show’s many cameos, John Cena, in S3E5 (“Children”), as brother Sammy. Dramatically, the dining room has become something more like a break room, where at least we’re able to escape Carm’s overbearing focus for a few minutes.
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Richie’s crash course in three-star fine-dining service, in S2E7 (“Forks”), gave him a new and profound sense of purpose. Carm treats the kitchen as a dreadful forum for his self-hatred; Richie treats the dining room as the grand stage for his newfound self-respect. The question, then, in Season 4, is whether he can impart a greater fraction of that professionalism to his misfit servers and also Gary, the disgraced Cubs pitcher turned clueless sommelier (who, as of Season 3, still doesn’t know a ton about wine …).
The Kitchen
Let us take a moment to reminisce about Syd’s risotto with short ribs, a dish that she diligently perfected, Carm’s nitpicks notwithstanding, and then unsuspectingly served, in S1E6 (“Ceres”), to a customer who turned out to be a food critic. His rave review of The Beef prematurely christened the spot’s relaunch into fine dining, though not before an experiment with online takeout ordering, in S1E7 (“Review”), nearly killed the entire staff.
Syd’s short rib risotto was also her earliest effort to leave a mark on the restaurant formerly known as The Beef. She’s nearly as stifled in Season 3 as she was then. Carm is constantly rebuffing Syd’s creative attempts but then also simultaneously saddling her with greater responsibility—only to undermine her nominal authority anyway. Technically, Carm is the executive chef, and Syd is the chef de cuisine. Effectively, though, Carm is both, and he’s showing no signs of easing his iron grip on the menu or anything else. Syd could leave, of course—she’s sitting on a tantalizing offer to run the kitchen at Ever. And her strong relationships with Marcus and Tina mean that she could feasibly take a talented third of the kitchen with her.
Look, Carm isn’t entirely self-absorbed. He invests in his colleagues, to a point. He sent Marcus to Copenhagen, in S2E4 (“Honeydew”), to elevate his confectionery skills. He sent Richie downtown for a few weeks, in S2E7 (“Forks”), to have the most constructive divorcé crisis of all time. There’s the version of Carm who believes in these people, and then there’s the version of Carm who nevertheless shuts them down, shuts them out. We root for the former to overcome the latter, of course. That’s the neurotic ballad of Carmen Berzatto. “We could make it calm,” he insists in the Season 4 trailer, perhaps delusionally—but we’ll see. His kitchen is obviously going to be a bloody, fiery mess so long as he insists on writing an entirely new menu (that he has to source, that his chefs and his waitstaff have to cram) for every service. The Season 4 trailer shows several characters reading aloud bits of a negative review of the restaurant, for instance: “Consistency seems to be the weak link here.” You think?!
Carm’s hectic experimentation with the menu in Season 3 underscored a deeper incoherence in his outlook on life, his restaurant, and his team. What, ultimately, is the goal? This isn’t Ratatouille. These guys aren’t waiting for one transcendentally effusive review that will definitively justify everyone’s painstaking effort to keep this place running. Success for these people is critical but also commercial but also psychological—and even then, even at the height of acclaim and the brink of perfection, Carmen Berzatto is only ever going to be so satisfied.
The Back Office
The Bear is stressful enough as a show about a team of hotheads grinding out orders at a disastrously ambitious restaurant. But then we also have Cicero and Sugar desperately trying to make this place make financial sense—a dismal enough endeavor for the average restaurant, and a virtually impossible mission for The Bear, so long as Carm insists on slathering everything on his constantly changing menu in $10,000 butter.
Cicero is the shakiest player in this whole drama. On the one hand, he’s clearly keen to see a return on his investment, and in this sense he’s better off shuttering the restaurant and turning the lot into condos or something. On the other hand, The Bear has over the seasons gotten increasingly sentimental, and so even the grumbling, penny-pinching Cicero seems at times to have contracted some sincere emotional stake in the success of Carm, Richie, and even Syd. Here’s a proud, if exasperated, uncle who truly loves his prodigal nephew but also anticipates the need to wring his neck, if that’s what it takes to snap Carm back to the shady reality of his restaurant’s financing.
In the trailer for Season 4, Cicero introduces a sort of doomsday clock that’s somehow counting down, in real time, the negative cash flow of The Bear. “When that shows zero,” Cicero tells the executive team, “this restaurant needs to cease operations.” This isn’t the first time he’s given this sort of ultimatum, but this is potentially the final season of The Bear (considering there’s no word yet on whether it’ll be renewed), so …
The Friends-and-Family Table
Carm’s mom, Donna, ditched the grand opening of the restaurant in the Season 2 finale (“The Bear”), but now the Season 4 trailer has her greeting Carm at Tiff and Frank’s wedding—a rough day for Richie, surely. (Tiff is Richie’s ex-wife, if you recall.)
Donna was rather tremendously introduced via flashback, in S2E6 (“Fishes”), as a shell-shocked mother with a cluttered kitchen and a short fuse. She’s later seen, in the present day, loitering outside the restaurant in the second season finale only for her to, in a moment of self-hatred, tearfully refuse to enter (during a heartbreaking conversation with Sugar’s husband, Pete). The Season 4 trailer shows her latest attempt to reconnect with her kids. We could make it calm, she now seems to be wordlessly promising Carm—again, we’ll see. There’s a chain of self-loathing running through this family, and in the shadow of Carm and Sugar’s late brother, Michael, perhaps Donna holds some key to helping her other kids break free.
And then there’s Molly Gordon’s Claire, the North Side dreamgirl who ultimately got her heart broken by Carm in Season 2 and then haunted Season 3 through oblique mentions, seemingly teasing some sort of reckoning with Carm. She never actually showed up in the previous season, though, and she’s not in the new trailer, so who knows? She’s been given enough distance from Carm at this point that the best-case scenario for any sort of closure between them, I suspect, will be something slight and bittersweet rather than a big, bold romantic gesture.
Compare all of this big-family psychodrama on the Berzatto side of things to Sydney Adamu’s relatively low-key and tender relationship with her own father, Emmanuel, who once proudly assured Syd that The Bear was “the thing.” I’ll always appreciate an opportunity to watch Robert Townsend, and I’m sure Syd will appreciate his words of wisdom in Season 4 more than ever.
