‘The Bear’ Is Best at Its Most Stressful

The first season of The Bear was some of the most wonderfully stressful television ever produced. This was an angry and clamoring workplace drama about a bunch of misfits slinging wet beef and salty fries at a family-run grease spot in Chicago. In its second season, The Bear became a bit less furious and bit more tender—the infamous “Fishes” episode notwithstanding. Richie used to be good for a laugh. Now he’s good for a cry, too.

But the third episode of the third season—“Doors”—is a return to form. It’s the sort of awfully engrossing workplace stress dream that drove so much acclaim for the series upon its premiere two years ago. “Doors” shows the Bear in its first month of operation, but with a passage of time distorted and condensed to the point that it’s all meant to feel like one continuous shift. The montage is unbearable; it’s irresistible. The frenzied energy of “Doors” is, strangely, a huge relief, because as much as I loved the sappier turns the series took in Season 2, “Doors” is what The Bear classically does best: inflicting these characters upon each other in close quarters, in crude camaraderie, in pursuit of culinary excellence. But now Carmy has raised the standard for his staff from excellence to transcendence. “Doors” is the vivid illustration of those growing pains.

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In the previous episode (“Next”), Carm scribbled a list of “non-negotiables” for the Bear and disseminated them to his bewildered staff. Chiefly, Carm insists on overhauling the menu every single day. “We’re gonna get a [Michelin] star,” he resolves to a skeptical Sydney. She and Richie both protest, to no avail. In “Doors,” then, everyone must roll with the punches for a month of breakneck innovation. Carm passionately devises countless dishes—and then heartlessly discards them over some minuscule imperfection that only he can see.

Carmy also insists on sourcing only the scarcest and highest quality ingredients for the menu at the Bear. At one point, Cicero confronts Carm with an invoice for $11,268 for 180 pounds of butter. The exchange that follows is ludicrous:

Cicero: Buddy, what is it? The fucking rare Transylvanian five-titted goat?

Carmy: It’s Orwellian.

Cicero: It’s dystopian butter?

Carmy: It’s from Orwell, Vermont!

Cicero: Of course! I’m gonna send ’em 20-fucking-grand!

Carmy: It’s the best!

Cicero: Oh yeah? Suck me!

It’s the best. This mindset is probably going to get this restaurant killed, but it’s also probably going to get them a Michelin star in the process. Has Cicero seen what these cooks can do with half a stick of butter?

Syd is clearly uncomfortable with Carm’s tendency to hijack creative control in what is otherwise constantly pitched to her, in contract terms, as a “partnership,” but in “Doors,” reluctantly, she plays ball. In fact, in “Doors,” she’s at the height of her savvy and composure in this impossible job. She keeps the so-called cousins from killing each other. She keeps the orders rolling into service despite Carm’s determination to spike every other dish the kitchen produces. There’s one particularly heart-breaking shot of him slamming a wagyu from Tina into the trash before we can even get a good look at it. But Tina persists, as does Syd, as does Richie; this machine works well enough, for now. There’s a real sense of regimentation and clockwork and productive persistence—and, frankly, repression—at the newly opened restaurant. It’s not Ever across town, by any means, but the Bear is chaos just enough under control. Carm threatens a meltdown in the final minutes of the episode but Syd diffuses him just so. She isn’t working with him at this point so much as working around him. It’s a delicate dance she’s doing around a lot of smashed plates.

Richie and Carm are at each other’s throats in “Doors,” in the aftermath of their big postgame blow-up over Claire in the second season finale. Overwhelmed by his cousin’s mercurial direction, Richie drafts his own list of non-negotiables—e.g., “joy, just in general”—and these go over with Carm about as well as you’d expect. We see a shell-shocked Fak struggling to run even the simplest orders in these conditions. Meanwhile, Ebrahim is going through his own psychological crisis. His station becomes a pocket dimension of old-school sandwich-making. Mentally, he’s stuck back at the Beef, stuffing subs, refilling napkins, shouting to customers at the auxiliary take-out window. He’s usually played for comic relief. Here he’s as dreadfully immersed as the viewer.

It’s interesting how little of the anxiety on The Bear comes from interaction with patrons or failure on their terms. You almost never see customers complaining to the staff. You only sporadically see customers at all in “Doors,” including a group thrilled for Richie to give them a peek into the kitchen. You never see Richie hastily returning dishes back to the kitchen. People are fed. Customers are satisfied. The food at the Bear is at least as good as it looks on TV. There are hints of mixed reviews in the foodie press, but—for now, at least—these matter only so much. Carm is the biggest critic of the restaurant. His standards of excellence—excuse me, transcendence—are entirely self-styled. “If it’s not perfect,” Carm barks at Syd, “it doesn’t go out.” So many exquisite dishes—and not a single smudge. And yet, so much garbage.

Watching The Bear, especially the scenes set at the handful of other restaurants featured in the series, I’m often thinking about the documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, which peeked into the production process at Studio Ghibli and the creative routines of its founders, including Hayao Miyazaki. You could watch that film and come away thinking that a craft as poorly paid, highly insecure, and intensely stressful as hand-drawn theatrical animation was in fact the most peaceful profession in the creative arts. Ghibli is an idyllic workshop. Miyazaki seems to treat his people well, and he’s become no less ambitious with age. The restaurants idealized in the Bear—Ever, the French Laundry, the unnamed restaurant in Copenhagen—all run on a similar Ghibli-esque magic; a certain enlightenment about the proper balance of ambition and inner peace. Later in The Bear Season 3, in a glimpse of Carmy’s past, we see him starting his stint at the French Laundry. Thomas Keller—one of many culinary cameos in the new season—coaches his new hire through trussing chickens with lofty benevolence. Chef Terry is similarly kind to Carm in their time together and, in fact, once tried to curb his tendency to shout, argue, and degenerate. He’s haunted, of course, by the one mentor (Joel McHale’s David Fields) whom he should ostensibly be the least eager to emulate; the one mentor whose criticisms he can’t unhear; the mentor whose influence resounds most clearly in the kitchen of “Doors.”

The restaurant is off to an exquisitely miserable start, though not without the commendable efforts of Richie and Fak to lighten up the service a little. Reviewing expenses, Cicero grills Carm and Natalie: “Who the fuck bought Super Soakers? What the fuck is a Tuesday Surprise?” These are hints of the dream kitchen the Bear could be—if only Carm and Cicero would let it. For now, in “Doors,” it’s a mess of unresolved tensions, which the episode’s constant stream of classical symphonies emphasizes nicely. Syd never blows up at Carm or Richie in “Doors,” even at the heights of madness in these scenes. But clearly this isn’t the dream job she’s being sold by Carm, Natalie, and Cicero—this is a nightmare gig that never ends. She’s going to peak somehow, at some point. If Carm would stop staring into pools of demi-glace for 10 seconds, he’d notice Syd staring at the exits.