GRRRRR
For a few weeks now, I’ve been like: do I need to write about The Bear?
I watched the first episode and couldn’t finish it because the dialogue sounded to me like the writers’ room had only heard about a kitchen for the first time a couple months ago. The words “corner” and “knife behind” were said with such relish and exuberance, a new feel in someone’s mouth. I simply could not deal.
Then I was like “this will probably be important” so in I dove in once more. I had a nice time watching! I love hearing them say “cousin”. Some parts were brilliant (children’s birthday party) and some were disappointingly contrived (whiny sister vibes!). The show itself is strong, with a pace that matches a kitchen’s tempo nicely.
More shocking to me than any scenes of Back Of House joy and madness has been the public obsession with the show; media attention for The Bear seems to go on forever. Nearly two months after the show’s premiere, think-pieces are still rapid-fire zooming around the internet. This show was engaging, for sure, but still—why?
Besides the weird feeling of being a cook in a world where everyone is suddenly talking about cooks, I felt unsettled. I realized it had to do less with the show itself, and more with what I was reading about it.
REALITY TV
Reviewers have lauded this show due to its authenticity.
“All these characters and more contribute to the sense of a very real and lived-in workplace, and that’s as appealing in and of itself as the performances are” wrote Alan Sepinwall in Rolling Stone. He’s not wrong: the choreography is impressive and performances are nuanced and natural.
Still, something echoes strangely to me about a phrase like this. Words like real and lived in. Something about a television critic validating how real a kitchen is, through the conduit of Rolling Stone. To the best of my knowledge, Sepinwall has not been a cook in a restaurant (though please correct me if I am wrong lol). To talk about something lived-in, one has to be familiar with the thing itself. To say that something feels real, one has to have experienced the thing that they’re talking about.
There’s nothing wrong with not having worked in a kitchen!!
Go off! Lol. I’m not condemning or criticizing people for writing about kitchens when they haven’t worked in them… at least not really.
What I’m interested in is this space where we assume our proximity to something. Kitchens are defined by physical labor and embodiment. A statement of reality due to a perception of the “lived-in” represents, to me, a particular sort of sentimental attachment to pop culture’s idea of kitchens while a lack of physical relationship to a kitchen itself.
LINE COOK SUMMER
Is the decree of this season, from a piece by Sarah York in Bon Appétit. Hmm. As a person who has been a line cook during the summer, I can assure you it is a very sweaty experience.
Line Cook has quickly become an internet character. The public gaze seems to have turned to the handsome character of Carmy, inspiring many crushes. A specific type of article has popped up that I’d categorize as something like: What Is It Like to Have Sex with a Line Cook?
The general thesis? From York, “He’s a guy you date for about three to five very fun weeks, but don’t count on your ‘relationship’ to last longer than the bottarga in his apartment refrigerator.”
Chefs are sexy and might feed you physically, but not emotionally. They have cultural capital in the sensory, but lack any social or intellectual dexterity. People seem to be having fun examining the chef as object, wondering about the touch of a calloused hand.
These pieces seem oriented towards an audience for whom line cooks are a mystery. It’s worth noting that much more often than not, the Sexually Competent Dirtbag Line Cook is gendered “he”. Is there something about objectification of the masculine that makes us more comfortable in sexualizing a profession while labeling that population emotionally unstable? At the very least here, we run the risk of turning jobs into characters. I come away reminded that objectification always implies distance.
But above all, the praise for the show seems to center on perceived trauma.
Most articles that validate the show say that it was arrestingly hard to watch because it was so stressful to see what a kitchen is like. The pace, the roughness, the pain the show conveys seems to have had the effect of making a viewer wince, walk away from watching, and then return again for more.
Helen Rosner wrote in The New Yorker that “The most authentic thing about the Beef might be how awful it seems to work there.”
Genevieve Yam, a cook, wrote in Bon Appétit, “it was a stark reminder of our trauma”.
Vanity Fair covered Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri, chef and sous chef of the show, hearing about that Bon Appétit article and discerning what Yam’s trigger meant in real-time. “Which is… nice? It’s nice.” White concluded.
The collective agreement seems that because the show is triggering, it must be accurate. Because, as Edebiri says, “It’s really painful to watch. But it’s really good!”
THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE
Where does this locate actual line cooks, not actors, not critics? It’s not inherently bad to say that a show is strong because it creates a sense of reality, but if the sense of reality seems to specifically come from a place of human suffering, perhaps this plays into the narrative of how troubling kitchen spaces actually can be. We are left with the unsettling understanding, at least for the resounding critical and cultural audience, that we think pain defines chef-dom.
As Peter Levine said, “Trauma is in the nervous system, not in the event.”
I’m not surprised that there is some misunderstanding between public perception and reality. Professional kitchens are worlds most people haven’t seen.
Much is left to the imagination, and that makes a lot of sense. The amount of times I’ve thought about how hidden away a kitchen is from the theatre of the restaurant is endless, those thoughts mostly arising when I’ve been on my hands and knees scrubbing my station. It’s not an accident that kitchens are often shadowed, increasingly underground as cities continue to cramp. Sometimes I’ve thought that kitchens are hidden, in part, to emphasize the magic of food as appearing disembodied, as if out of nowhere.
The first week I ever worked in a kitchen, I distinctly remember hopping off the train at West 4th street mouthing to myself “I am a cook. I am a line cook. I am a cook.” I couldn’t help but smile! That sounded so cool to me, so audacious. I am a cook! I work in the kitchen of a restaurant! Me! In the following weeks, between bouts of getting screamed at, I would say “corner” with more gusto than Jeremy Allen White could ever dream of.
Most of my work life has existed in a kitchen. For me, a lot of the joy of being a line cook is being in a world unlike almost anything else. Underground, topsy turvy, and filled with motion. Sometimes it is very terrible!! It’s a transient industry for a reason! People get hurt. It can be a conduit for essentially all dark facets of human nature and systemic injustice. And boy… the masochism! But also… the adrenaline! Something I understand most about working in kitchens is how good and also bad it can be. How sexy and unsexy. How it holistically can deplete you. How it gives you stories forever, crazier than you could have imagined, that you will always feel guilty telling. I clearly have a complicated relationship to kitchens, but there is one thing for certain: working in kitchens has made me feel very alive.
AN OPEN KITCHEN
Knowing the depth and breadth of kitchen labor—both the joy and the pain -- is what makes me frustrated at how confused and flimsy these Bear takes can seem. Of course kitchens are and can be traumatic! They operate off of fight-or-flight and adrenaline, a sense of urgency, a brigade system.
I don’t doubt that restaurant workers speaking out on how they’re triggered furthers the cause of ultimately making kitchens safer places to work. The cooks who have written pieces about their trauma are brave and I am grateful to them.
It makes me think, more broadly, that the buzz of kitchen trauma and a glamorized intrigue around damaged chefs distracts from an unnerving reality: we’re accepting these spaces as broken. Entertained by seeing people act out how. If we took a break from watching and assuming something feels real because it holds pain, we might have space to ask ourselves why it needs to be so painful in the first place in order to for us to be interested. If we get another season: what do we want from it?
THE BEAR
There is something absurd and funny about how the imagination of this trauma exists, for the show, in an anthropomorphized bear. Popping up, pawing the cage, restless and monstrous. Coming in dreams, titling the show, roaring. I wonder if there’s a way for us to try, somehow, to make it all more human.