Jeremy Allen White as “Carmy” Berzatto in the memorable “Omelette” episode in season 2 of The Bear.Credit:Chuck Hodes/FX
As it begins,chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) has returned home to Chicago to take over the failing family business,The Original Beef of Chicagoland,a small sandwich shop nestled in the shadows of the River North neighbourhood’s high-rises. He’s there because his charismatic but deeply troubled older brother,Mikey (Jon Bernthal),took his own life,leaving his family to deal with the consequences.
Mikey appears in several sequences – which are marked as flashbacks only by his presence – but it’s his absence that drives much of what happens outside them. He’s like a ghost haunting the series. Perfectionist Carmy is still measuring his own worth against the big brother he’s lost. Down-to-earth sister Natalie,aka “Sugar” (Abby Elliott),has been keeping her distance from The Beef because of its painful connections to the past. And abrasive cousin Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) continues to work there in front-of-house not only because of his limited options but also out of a sense of duty to Mikey.
It’s a family nightmare with Carmy at the centre of things. His way of dealing with the past is to build a different future. His goal is to turn The Beef into The Bear,named after a moniker given to him in childhood and modelled on the fine-dining restaurants where he’d worked before coming back to Chicago. Showing fatherly interest as well as providing financial support and sage advice is Jimmy (Oliver Platt),who’d been best friend to the Berzatto siblings’ late father.
Inheriting some of the old staff – prickly Latina Tina (Liza Colon-Zayas) and taciturn Somalian refugee Ebra (Edwin Lee Gibson) in the kitchen,as well as Fak and “Sweeps”,a handymen duo (played by real-life chef Matty Matheson and Corey Hendrix) – Carmy also takes on ambitious young African-American chefs Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and Marcus (Lionel Boyce). But not everyone approves of his plan.
The close bond between “Carmy” (Jeremy Allen White) and chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) is often left unspoken in The Bear.Credit:Chuck Hodes/FX
Richie tells Sydney that “the neighbourhood is held together by a shared history and love and respect”,and that changing The Beef represents a betrayal of that. And one of the key motifs of the series is the intertwining of The Beef’s melting pot and Chicago’s daily life. Every episode offers masterful montages of streets with their hustle and bustle,buildings,storefronts,monuments,the “L” train and its tracks and tunnels,the kitchen staff,and the dishes they’re preparing.
Ebra’s worried about the changes because he doesn’t want the land of promise he’s found in America to become something different. For him,the small things matter,and he doesn’t want to wear the “uniform” that would be required because it reminds him of the war-torn Somalia he’d fled. Like almost everyone else in the series,he is prey to the dark anxieties lurking at the edge of his consciousness.
The Bear brings all of its characters to vibrant life,the tightness of the bond between the culinary dreamers in the kitchen embodied in the way they always respectfully address each other as “chef”,even when they’re at loggerheads. Richie,Fak and Sweeps mightn’t earn that particular acknowledgement,but each in his own way connects to the sense of family that has evolved in the eatery,even if the shared love often looks and sounds more like loathing,especially when Richie is making his presence felt.