I’ll spare you too much throat clearing about the things I like about the now-embattled good-TV phenom The Bear. I’ll even say that the show might be slightly overdragged after an underwhelming Season 3. But here’s my personal beef with The Bear: It should be funnier.
I like good food. I identify with the passion for craft. But fussy haute cuisine—of the fourteen-dollar bread course, tableside brodo service, tweezered microbasil persuasion—is worthy of some irreverence. The Bear barely acknowledges this. Instead, the luxury dining industry is presented as a potential solvent for toxic masculinity and a path to self-betterment for the downtrodden.
A smarter show would treat the idea that there is something noble in submitting to a hyperexploitative workplace—to gratify a demonically entitled clientele, no less—with much more interrogating irony. (Fun fact: Writer Alex O’Keefe, who worked on Season 1, became a symbol of the 2023 writers’ strike when he spoke out about being paid poverty wages.) For all its attention to relatable Chicago folk, The Bear leaves the question of who eats at the Bear in soft focus.
Noma, the shuttering sanctum of New Nordic cuisine that serves as The Bear’s fine-dining lodestar, also inspired The Menu (2022). That overcooked “Eat the Rich” turkey assumed the enterprise’s pretentions as symbols of a literally horrific alienation, with our protagonist, an escort, ultimately vindicated when she orders a cheeseburger and fries.
There’s some inverted snobbery in The Menu’s ground-chuck populism, but The Bear’s progression from cheap-and-cheerful Italian beef to wagyu cheeks could use more than a drizzle of acid. In Season 3, Christopher Zucchero, real-life inspiration for Season 1’s pre-Bear “Mr. Beef” restaurant, pops by. This plays as just another colorful cameo when his message to quixotic Chef Carm (Jeremy Allen White) from his former regulars should throw the queasier assumptions of the whole show into tart relief: “Yo, fuck this fancy fuck. I want my shit.”