It’s been a crazy few years filled with incredible challenges from politics to inflation to COVID and everything else in between. Won’t talk about the "bear" in the room, so to speak, but the pandemic changed the landscape for all businesses, with particular extremeness to the culinary industry. Many staples in our communities have shuttered as a result, and the truth is, we won’t know if we will ever be the same. As a restaurant and food truck owner and operator myself, I know all too well about this bunt reality.
My husband is always looking for new shows to watch on our down time at home and stumbled upon a new show on HULU called The Bear. It caught my attention and once I started doing some research to find out what it was about, it struck me – THIS IS US! THIS IS OUR STORY!
I was hooked, seeing how Chef Carmy’s (played by Jeremy Allen White) trials were our trials. From struggling to meet vendors’ payable deadlines to trying to finding the whole Caribbean Red Snapper that is part of our signature dish to tracking down garlic paste that all seemed so hard to find for the better part of five months. Our supply chain was in shambles — one day we can’t find sugar and the next we can’t find our usual industrial sized batch of corn starch!
To further illustrate the adversity, we also dealt with staff shortages, call-outs, the big COVID surge in late December 2021 and the mask mandate in LA County. All created a cloud of doubt that hovered simultaneously over trying to create a synergy and system between veteran and new team members that may or may not have experience in the industry, all while delicately traversing that tightrope where one false step, or in this case, hire, can create more chaos and send you into a tailspin.
One thing that all chefs develop and build throughout their career is confidence. Chef Carmy is stripped naked of it from the beginning of his journey. His confidence, as he explains, comes from his love language of cooking. You can see how that and his subconscious blend together with flashbacks from his previous hell of working in a demanding fine dining kitchen.
A defining moment in a symphony of kitchen chaos played out in a particular scene that we in the restaurant industry have all felt the most identified: when the going gets rough, where ticket after ticket piles up, when someone loses their temper and food flies, when you’re in the weeds and your kitchen feels like it’s on fire. That has been us, as chefs, at any given moment in the kitchen.
As a restaurant owner and chef, you not only have to balance your career but also your personal life. Mental health is vital as we have learned from the tragic passing of Chef Anthony Bourdain to learning from the first episode that Carmy’s big brother, Michael, and also an original owner of the family restaurant that Carmy inherited, committed suicide. The parallels are uncanny. Some nights I can’t sleep or when I finally can, I’m awakened by a dream of culinary brilliance which I suddenly feel compelled to write down just so I won’t forget the sprig of inspiration in the morning.
While not trying to spoil the plot of the show, I followed along in the hero’s journey that parallels my very own. I have ridden the culinary rollercoaster with its peaks and valleys of daily struggles and achievements. This show sits you right in front of the plight that chefs and restaurateurs all go through in a real, gritty and unglamorous way that has you emotionally invested enough to want to celebrate Chef Carmy and his crew's triumphs and cry for their defeats. It’s raw. It’s real. It’s my life.
After news of The Bear being renewed for a second season, it's clear that the masses are on board for the thrill ride that is a chef's life.
