How does The Bear compare to real kitchens?

David Fields (Joel McHale) is an overbearing and abusive mentor to Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and shows a side of the food industry many would rather not see.

The Bear is adrenaline filled, loud and chaotic. The food looks incredible, the sheer heat and pressure draws us in as viewers, and while I may be a little bit late to the party, I want to share my opinions on how the show reflects real kitchens as I have experienced them.

I suppose the best place to start is with the chaos in the kitchen. In my experience kitchens can definitely become the messy, borderline violent insanity that is shown on The Bear. Sometimes orders don’t come in on time, sometimes servers take an order wrong, sometimes things get burned, miscommunications happen constantly. It really depends on how we deal with those things that determine the environment in the kitchen. I have definitely worked in kitchens where chefs have almost come to blows, and also in kitchens where no matter how busy it gets people are still having fun and laughing and joking. If you’re lucky, the second type is the kitchen you end up in. Of course even in those types of kitchens you still get on each others nerves but it’s a lot easier to overcome and deal with. Kitchens are, by their very nature, stressful. It’s long hours in less than ideal conditions, often times going without breaks.

In the show Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) is plagued with stress induced nightmares and flashbacks, designed to show the extreme toll that the industry can take on a persons mental health. In the final episode of season 3 there is a line that stuck out to me as a hallmark for how the industry can impact a person “I’ve always been an adrenaline junkie, I just didn’t want to pay with my sanity anymore”. I’ve known chefs who have had 30+ years of experience and enjoyed every minute of it, and I’ve known chefs who have burned out after just a few years or even months. The truth of the matter is that it is mainly about how you handle it, and I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve had my fair share of cries after work, be it from the tiredness, the stress, getting chewed out because something went wrong that wasn’t your fault, or maybe just because you had a bad day. In my opinion it’s very important that these issues are actually shown and that we get to see a character deal with them, because it is a part of the industry. During one particular very difficult time that I was dealing with both work stress and family stress, a lecturer I had in college told me something I will always keep in mind: “You don’t own the copyright to these problems, everyone deals with it at some point”.

Part of the underbelly of the industry that the show portrays is the almost obsessive compulsive nature of the job, you have to live and breathe it if you want to survive in the highest end kitchens. I myself tend to spend at least one to two days a week trying new ideas and recipes, thankfully my Girlfriend is always a willing taste tester. But even down to the way that we keep our kitchens, the way that we clean down after every service, organise the fridge, do our prep lists for the next day, no matter how long of a day it’s been, it all comes from a compulsive drive to do better. The problem is when that drive becomes less about creating better food, and more about feeding ones own ego which is something that we see happen slowly in The Bear. We also see the effect of this on the chefs around a chef like that, from the interactions Carmy has with David Fields (Joel McHale).

Another element that has drawn attention is the language that’s used, and the continuous yelling even when not necessary. Kitchens are loud places and sometimes you have to shout to be heard over the hustle and bustle, that is true, but do chefs shout and swear even when they aren’t in the middle of a Saturday night service? Yes, yes they do. I have worked with chefs from may countries and as a result have had the good fortune (I’m trying to put a positive spin on it okay?) to pick up bits and pieces of a number of languages, almost none of which should ever be used in polite company. Thankfully the vast majority of chefs find it as almost a safety valve, a way to let off steam so that they return to baseline.

I’ll wrap this up by saying that while it obviously dramatizes a lot of things, the core of The Bear is grounded in reality. Even down to the way that things go wrong, and how you need to keep going. While it does show certain parts of the industry in a negative light, it also shows a lot of the positives of the industry. It’s a job that I and many others love, despite or perhaps because of the problems listed above. I will end on the note that The Bear is about as realistic as you could find in terms of a TV Show reflecting a career, and it is also one of my favourite shows, I have it on in the background as I sit here writing this.