YES CHEF
His memories of his past life are pristine and perfect. The walls are without blemishes or stains; every dish on every plate is as close to a piece of art as it can be. There’s calm - each chef at their own station, contributing to the running of a finely tuned whole. He is at the centre of it. Other chefs, in their whites, with blue aprons, bring him things: sauces, components of whole dishes. Only he will tell them if it’s good enough. The sound comes and goes in fragments: pencils scrawling on pads, butter frying. Whenever he calls something out to the room - a table, an order number - they answer back in perfect harmony; a call-and-response like a platoon of soldiers. Their declarations are simple: HEARD or YES CHEF. He is Carmy, and this is New York City, a year ago. A year before he left the fine dining world that he was on top of; returning to Chicago to run the sandwich shop that used to belong to his late brother.
He is at the centre of the kitchen, but not the centre of the universe. There’s someone else, more senior than him. He’s nameless in the credits, just NYC Chef. He approaches Carmy and begins to lay into him - a critique that gets under the skin, as finely measured and pristine as the environment that both of them call home.
- You are not so tough, you are talentless, you are bullshit. Say fucking hands.
- HANDS
- You should be dead.
He isn’t dead. He’s back in Chicago, in his new kitchen, worlds away from the quiet of New York. There are overlapping voices, beeping alarms, the sound of food cooking - maybe burning. There’s oil on the floor, a broken egg. And still he intones, HANDS, somebody fuckin’ answer me.
Each kitchen feels like an extension of Carmy. His colleagues in Chicago aren’t as uniform as those from New York; they don’t call back YES CHEF like a chorus, don’t keep everything around them as close to perfect as mortal hands can reach towards. On the surface, the Chicago kitchen is more violent - late on in the first season of The Bear, there’s a maybe-accidental burst of violence - but its the fine dining kitchen that lingers in his dreams, nightmares. That’s the demon that he’s trying to exorcise on his return to Chicago, and his attempts to refine and reform the old sandwich shop. He isn’t dead yet, and neither is the business. Both are keeping their heads above water. Just.
On an a private island, the world-renowned chef Chef Slowik is bringing together the tasting menu to end all tasting menus. A labyrinthine succession of courses that becomes a mirror to the island, his guests, himself. One of these dishes is prepared by a sous-chef, Jeremy.
- He’s good. He’s very good. But he’s not great. He’ll never be great. He desperately wants my prestige, my job, my talent. He aspires to greatness, but he’ll never achieve it. Correct, Jeremy?
- Yes chef.
The dish that Jeremy prepares is called The Mess. The ingredients are pressure-cooked vegetables, marrow, and a beef jus. Slowik says that the title of this dish is a reference to the mess you make of your life. Of your body. Of your sanity. His back and forth continues with Jeremy, as the diners watch. Jeremy cries, silently, and Slowik kisses him once on each cheek. And then the mess of The Mess becomes brutally, viscerally clear, as Jeremy puts a handgun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. His last words are No, chef.
It’s tempting to draw a line from the nameless NYC Chef to Slowik, but the real parallel exists between Jeremy and Carmy. Two young men who give all of themselves to their work; to industries that consider them disposable, and customers who will never acknowledge their existence. They are broken down and remade, over and over again. There’s something of this in the philosophy of Fight Club, if it counts as a philosophy: that these men wailing on each other is about what it means to be broken down and remade. This idea, this imagery, is inescapable in the kitchen: the butchery of animals; the breaking of eggs to make omelettes; the bringing together of broken, dead things, in order to make something new. Each dish a kind of rebirth, or at least an attempt at one, for the chef behind it. And there’s so much fire, an image of almost archetypal cleansing. Carmy himself gestures towards this when he talks to a colleague about a fire back in New York that he was in two minds about putting out, acknowledging that if the whole building were to go up in flames, then all of his own anxiety would go with it, becoming a pile of ashes beneath what was once a restaurant.
It isn’t just Carmy and Jeremy who find themselves paying this deep, existential cost of doing business. It’s everyone else toiling away in Slowik’s kitchen on Hawthorne Island; the anonymous chef that brings a broken sauce to Carmy in New York. They all fall back on those same, choral responses: YES CHEF. There’s power in the hands of the chef, in what they offer to those who work with - under - them. The way that Carmy’s nameless boss causes him to wither up is one example. But it’s these chefs that decide what’s good enough; not just in a dish, but in a person. A person who pours everything into this profession, this craft, all in the knowledge that they might be told, endlessly, broken sauce chef, I need a new one. They don’t have names, they’re just chef. Carmy insists its a sign of respect when he’s asked about it - and his constant yelling - early on in The Bear. But it’s also a way to create anonymity; to no longer be a person but your work; the dishes that may or may not even make it out to customers.
There’s a lot of suicide in these kitchens. Jeremy shoots himself in The Menu, and Carmy is told he should be dead, but it reaches out further than that. Carmy’s brother also took his own life, and in The Menu, the know-it-all diner Tyler is offered the chance to cook - for Slowik, for his fellow guests - and Slowik’s response (which we never hear) is so scathing that the next time Tyler is seen, its in the corner of a shot, hanging from a tie in a supply closet. Maybe Slowik said to him you are not so tough, you are talentless, you are bullshit.
Slowik has a lot of acts to grind; with the customers who don’t care enough to remember what they were served on their last visit, to the critics that once put him on the map. Each of them cogs in a system of fine dining, each of them finding their own unique way to get under the skin of chefs, and make them question their ability, their identity, themselves - even if Slowik himself does this with villainous glee. The Bear is about reforming the toxicity of fine dining as much as anything else; about the ghosts of Carmy’s past, and what it means to try and let them go. The Menu is about this to, although its got class war in its DNA - the fate of one character is sealed when its revealed they went to Brown without any kind of student loans - and while the politics of these kitchens differ, their politics are the same: check your sense of self at the door, and get ready to give everything - everything - in the service of these dishes.
Both The Menu and The Bear close on what might be called regime change. In the latter, an unexpected windfall gives Carmy the chance to do the unexpected, unthinkable, maybe impossible: turn his brother’s restaurant, Original Beef of Chicagoland, into fine dining but with sandwiches. He’s able to rebuild not just the restaurant but himself. Slowik’s restaurant on Hawthorne Island also ends up closing its doors, but in a different way; one that echoes the primordial, elemental cleansing of the kitchen. But before Slowik’s s’mores are set alight, he says a fond farewell to his staff, all of whom echo at the end, the same sentiment: WE LOVE YOU CHEF. For both restaurants, both chefs, their final question is about the cost of rebirth: what it would take, and if something like that is even possible. Carmy wants to try again; to remake things - he’s still striving for perfection, and probably will be forever. All those broken, butchered things going together in an attempt to make something new. Something different. Something better.