‘The Bear’ Strived for Michelin Quality in Season 3. Its Regulars Preferred the Comfort Food.

This past weekend, as I binge-watched the restaurant bros of The Bear futzing around with kitchen tweezers and slinging fuck-yous back and forth, I found myself lost in thought about a real-life restaurant, Bros’—punctuation intended. As the story goes, back in the fall of 2021, a writer named Geraldine DeRuiter and her friends sat down at the Michelin-starred restaurant, located on the stiletto heel of Italy. All of them looked forward to a night of cool, weirdo foodie bliss. And in a way, that’s indeed what they got: a dining experience that transcended the confines of our earthly plane.

Dinner at Bros’, DeRuiter would later reminisce in a viral and vividly photographed essay about her evening, was one of “those meals.” She didn’t mean this in a good way, and what’s more, she didn’t mean it in an ordinary bad way, either. “I’m not talking about a meal that’s poorly cooked, or a server who might be planning your murder,” she wrote. “That sort of thing happens in the fat lump of the bell curve of bad. Instead, I’m talking about the long tail stuff—the sort of meals that make you feel as though the fabric of reality is unraveling.”

Over four and a half hours and 20-some-odd courses, there was “an oyster loaf that tasted like Newark airport,” and “a marshmallow flavored like cuttlefish,” and “a dish called ‘frozen air’ which literally melted before you could eat it, which felt like a goddamn metaphor for the night,” DeRuiter wrote. And that was just one-ninth of it all.

According to Michelin’s restaurant ratings guide, which first gave Bros’ its (their?) star of distinction in 2018, “Bros’ is a synonym for a young, free spirit which is full of creativity and imagination,” a place where “two tasting menus that range from 20 to 25 small courses … can be ‘tracked’ in advance through a QR code.” According to DeRuiter, “There is no menu at Bros. Just a blank newspaper with a QR code linking to a video featuring one of the chefs, presumably, against a black background, talking directly into the camera about things entirely unrelated to food.” And according to one of those chefs—a brooding millennial named Floriano Pellegrino who defended himself against DeRuiter’s dispatch by issuing a clip-arted “Declaration” to The Today Show that involved, among other things, existential thoughts about the canon of horse art—“The contemporary artist asks you to think about beauty, to doubt yourself, to trust his creative process, to follow his ideas. That is how revolutions are born.”

Anyway, like I said, I was reminded of all of this while I was catching up on the third and newest season of The Bear.

Over its three seasons, the ballyhooed, award-winning FX on Hulu series has traced the evolution of a family-owned Chicagoland eatery as it transitions from a getcha hot beef joint called The Beef to a haute mess with only the highest aspirations called The Bear. Created by Christopher Storer and starring Jeremy Allen White, Ayo Edebiri, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach, the show’s plot and tone have always thrived on delving into the full temperature range of professional kitchens: the scalding tempers and the lukewarm receptions, the chill(y) cults of personality and the cold, hard cash.

Which is why an odd duck like Chef Floriano Pellegrino—who “loves the F-word so much that he used it on the boxes of his Christmas panettones,” according to The New York Times—would fit seamlessly into the show’s foulmouthed and meta mélange of elite chefs, some fictional, some thinly veiled, many simply playing themselves. And it’s why an eccentric high-wire business like Bros’, which is described on its website as “blend[ing] avant-garde cuisine with a deep connection to its local roots,” isn’t really that dissimilar to Carmy “The Bear” Berzatto’s revamped operation, which includes a list of “nonnegotiables” such as “Of the place” and “Constantly evolve through passion and creativity.” At both Bros’ and The Bear, one thing is for certain: When you sit down at your table, there’s absolutely no telling what you’re going to get or how it’s gonna taste.

Just as Bros’ serves up that fishy marshmallow (?), The Bear features its mortadella cannolis and a “caviar sundae.” For all his oddities, Pellegrino did earn that sweet, sweet Michelin star IRL; Carmy, meanwhile, fixates on getting one, to the detriment of both him and all of his colleagues. (And the viewers, too, who are ultimately left hanging on that front in Season 3.) The Michelin blurb for Bros’ remarks that many of the dishes are “finished with a theatrical flourish at your table,” and in The Bear, servers are given tableside tasks like pouring clear, steaming consommés over shipshape mirepoix. (On the one hand, the deconstructed-reconstructed soup looks like it would be bomb; on the other hand, every time I see it, I think of that tweet genre that’s like: “That’s a bus. You invented a bus.”) In The Bear, those servers sometimes fuck those jobs up, even when they follow directions; in DeRuiter’s review of Bros’, one exchange between a server and a diner involved the phrase “rancid ricotta” and read like it could have been performed by one or more of The Bear’s bumbling Fak brothers.

Ah, the Faks, the fuckin’ Faks, the perfect segue to the other reason that watching The Bear this season brought Bros’ and its ilk to mind. It isn’t just that the details of the ambitious and objectively absurd Italian endeavor can be compared to The Bear, the fictional restaurant. It’s that they have parallels with The Bear the series, too.

As a creative project, The Bear’s three-season existence has had an arc worthy of its flashy food industry subject matter. The show popped up in 2022 with a fresh, crisp point of view and a cool collection of talent who were on the cusp of breakout success. It was immediately the streaming equivalent of a hip reservation, and having watched it was an indicator that you Get It. Some people can nab trendy two tops at seven; others get to point at their TV screens and remark, Yeah, I used to drink juice out of plastic pint containers, too, back when I waitressed. Corner!

The show’s first two seasons were a joy to consume; watching them felt like getting a wink from the bartender and a li’l amuse-bouche on the house. There was a little something new in each episode for even the most ardent and discerning of repeat customers—an experimentation with form, perhaps, or a tiny cameo bursting with depth and flavor—but there was also the comfort of knowing you could throw the show on and expect some good back-of-house slang and lingering shots of juicy meats every time. The show received raves from critics and multiple Emmy Awards, which are kind of like television’s Michelin stars.

This season, though, sitting down to view The Bear has felt a little bit like visiting an off night at Bros’. Everyone wants to enjoy the best-in-class meal they looked forward to, but it’s hard to ignore the signs that the magic just isn’t in the room: the sloppy execution, the reliance on too much Tuesday surprise–style razzle-dazzle, that skosh of self-satisfaction that overpowers the dish. So much fussing over plating, so many proud refusals to simply play the hits. Charm can be hard to scale, and lately so much of what enhanced The Bear in small doses early on—the celebrity cameos, the moody Carmyheimer montages, the snappy overlapped yapping between minor characters who have long histories and short fuses—is laid on so thick that it’s a bit annoying to swallow.

“Overstuffed and undercooked” is how The New Yorker put it; “a clanging, wailing beast,” determined The New York Times. “If I have to hear the Fak diaspora go on about ‘haunting’ one more time, I’m going to lock myself in that walk-in,” thought The Ringer’s Katie Baker. This season, in a tortured attempt to chase laurels and dodge problems, Chef Carmy leaned far too hard into his big ideas (new menus every day?!) and too far onto his big ego. Similarly, The Bear appears to have reacted to its big success by, this season, losing the ability to taste its own cooking.

Rereading DeRuiter’s Bros’ dispatch, what stood out most to me was that she wasn’t even mad; she was just disappointed. Her writing has plenty of mounting disbelief and even desperation, sure, but you can also feel all the polite chewing, the sheer restraint. Her pained reaction to the various lumps and dabs and meat-molecule-infused droplets placed before her wasn’t one of those many such cases where a noob just doesn’t appreciate the vision of an Iris van Herpen couture show; it also wasn’t one of those situations where a Twitter engagement farmer riles people up by dissing Rothko. She was an enthusiastic diner who seemed plenty familiar with the quirks and realities and sliding scales and acquired tastes for lumps and dabs across the global restaurant industry, from mom-and-pop shops to haute cuisine.

Yet she still knew that what she’d been given to put in her mouth was molto bizzarro. Or I guess I should rearrange that to say: the mouth she’d been given. I’ll let DeRuiter recount the course she was served in a particularly bespoke vessel:

Another course—a citrus foam—was served in a plaster cast of the chef’s mouth. Absent utensils, we were told to lick it out of the chef’s mouth in a scene that I’m pretty sure was stolen from an eastern European horror film.

Sorry, I kind of buried the lede on that part, huh? Thankfully, there’s a reason for that: For all their recent struggles, both the fictional restaurant The Bear and the very real show around it have yet to curdle into anywhere near this level of silly narcissism.

The show still offers up plenty of perfect bites, on regular-ass plates: like any scene between Sugar’s normie husband and her volatile mother, or every examination of the way pride and self-sabotage can drive a wedge between creative and romantic partners alike, or all the small moments when Tina smiles to herself or Richie lovably flubs his family meal pep talk or Ebraheim successfully keeps the original dirtbaggy legacy of The Beef not just alive, but thriving. At its heart, The Bear still captures the promise and the ruin of an industry that’s fueled by a combination of restlessness and precision. It still demonstrates, somewhere in every episode, the frustrating reality that as soon as you take a bite of something, it’s gone, that once you earn that Michelin star, you have to keep hustling to retain it. A new table, a new script, a new season, a new bite—the hard thing about both The Bear’s and The Bear’s lines of work is that they’re forever having to refire.