The Original Beef of Chicagoland is the aptly named restaurant at the heart of the critically acclaimed FX series “The Bear,” starring Jeremy Allen White as Carmy, a world-class chef who returns home to run the deli of Chicagoland. run his family after his older brother’s suicide. Of all American cities, Chicago is the one whose mythos is most associated with a certain kind of work: honest, meaty, broad-shouldered labor that forges you into something greater, nobler. Like the town it’s set in, the restaurant in “The Bear” is an unpretentious place, humbly geared toward “the working man.” But ‘the working man’, we soon learn – when a young black female sous chef makes fun of an older white male manager’s use of the label – is a controversial term, especially in an environment where no one does anything but work, and virtually no one has anything to show for it.
It’s initially unclear why Carmy, once named one of Food & Wine’s “Best New Chefs,” has returned to the deli, but gradually we understand that he is compulsively returning to a traumatic place. Food was the common thread that connected him to his brother, but his brother wouldn’t let him in the kitchen, so he went to Sonoma and New York to make something of his own. The Original Beef of Chicagoland is also Carmy’s original beef – the core wound that ignited his ambition, the place of his connection to his family and his estrangement from it.
The story of the prodigal son returning from a peak performance to his salt-of-the-earth hometown is a beloved American tale, most often seen in Christmas movies about exhausted executives returning to their roots. They are meant to reinforce the reassuring idea that work isn’t everything – that the real America is slow, simple, sociable and (above all) honest, a place that rewards you for your efforts, full of wise, fatherly coots and simple, patient girls. who have been waiting all this time. But when Carmy returns to Chicago, he finds his elders absent or trying to exploit him, and the only girl interested in his feelings is his sister. Just as success could not save him, neither will honest work; it won’t even make enough money to make ends meet. The Original Beef may be a sign of noble, can-do labor, but it’s also a decompensating system on the brink of structural collapse. A few episodes later, the toilet explodes, unleashing a geyser in Carmy’s face. An industrial mixer blows a fuse, causing a power outage. The gas goes out, forcing the kitchen staff to build makeshift grills outside. They have no choice; a missed lunch service could turn them off. An 80s arcade game called Ball Breaker blares stupidly, violently from an angle and cleverly sums up the experience. “Your balls are broken!!” his screen announces. “Get on?”
“The Bear” has was praised for its visceral portrayal of the stresses of a professional kitchen, but you don’t need to have done restaurant work to recognize the chaos, panic, and uncertainty that the show so convincingly captures. In “The Bear,” work is a silly, sadistic game that left Carmy with uncontrolled PTSD. Intrusive thoughts and flashbacks break his consciousness; he even cooks in his sleep and almost sets his house on fire. Richie, the manager of the restaurant, takes Xanax because he suffers from ‘anxiety and anxiety’. (“Who doesn’t?” snaps Carmy.) Sydney, the sous-chef, has a closet full of drugs for heartburn and ulcers, problems that may have been caused by a failed attempt to run her own business. (“It was the first time I didn’t have a full-blown psychopath behind me screaming,” she says. “And I thought I wanted to, you know? But look where that took me.”) The restaurant is drowning in bills. When the characters aren’t yelling at each other at the highest volume, they often shut down to cope with all the yelling. Their customers are like children trapped in a car with warring parents. The word you see most often when writing about the show is “stressful,” but it’s often accompanied by workplace descriptions like “soul-crushing,” “toxic,” or “offensive.” All of this is meant as praise – the idea being that, despite the occasional excesses, the show captured something recognizable and true.
Hustle has always been romanticized in American culture, promising that in the end it pays to sacrifice yourself on the altar of endless work. But it is becoming increasingly clear that this is not the case for most people. Twenty-two years ago, when Anthony Bourdain published “Kitchen Confidential,” he glorified the kitchen as a foxhole, populated by savage, dysfunctional hard-butts yelling profanity at each other as they managed to make hundreds of plates every night. This may once have seemed exotic or picturesque, but that pressure cooker environment is becoming familiar to more and more workers in more and more industries. The U.S. economy has boomed over the past decade, but life has become more difficult for most: “In one of the best decades the U.S. economy has ever recorded, landlords, hospital administrators, college scholarship recipients, and daycare centers bled families.” annie. Lowrey wrote in The Atlantic in 2020. “For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.” “The Bear” is captivating not because of the way it mimics a kitchen, but because it captures something about modern work in general.
‘The Bear’ is captivating not because of the way it mimics a kitchen, but because it portrays something about modern work in general.
Carmy and Sydney work insane hours, getting up at dawn and waiting for L trains on dark platforms, too exhausted to think of anything else. Sometimes it seems like work is how they escape having to think about what happens to them. Sydney tells someone that her goal is to just do her job and live her life, but it’s obvious she has little life outside of work to talk about. These conditions do not stimulate creativity; on the contrary, they are counterproductive. Carmy doesn’t have time to listen to Sydney’s dinner menu ideas or encourage the pastry chef’s experiments with donuts. Exploring your talent, in this environment, can turn out to be another luxury the “working man” can’t afford, something that belongs exclusively to financially backed narcissists. This disparity comes to light early on in the show: we see Carmy being abused by an arrogant chef and visiting his Chicago gangster room, who talks the restaurant out—the place is beyond repair, he says—before he tries to buy it for himself.
Carmy is furious to learn that Richie has been dealing cocaine in the alley behind the restaurant to keep it afloat, but Richie justifies his actions by co-opting the language of entrepreneurship, attributing this hustle to getting the place through. covid. “That’s the kind of tenacity and ingenuity and out-of-the-box thinking that we look for in employees,” he says. “But that ship has sailed, my friend.” This is the surprising milieu and message of “The Bear”, the thing that struck a chord. The idea that crowds ultimately pay off is an insidious utopia. Everyone is in survival mode all the time. The system has failed. The place is beyond repair.
Source Photos: Screenshots and Photos from FX