Smashed: How true to life is The Bear? (pt.1)

Michelin chefs give their verdict

The Critically acclaimed TV series The Bear recently returned for its third season. With a chef (Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto played by Jeremy Allen White) aiming for Michelin stars as its central character, it’s required viewing for anyone who loves the world of restaurants.

The comedy-drama draws heavily on the modern fine dining scene for inspiration and the latest series includes cameos from top chefs playing themselves including Rene Redzepi, Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller. Cast member and producer Matty Matheson who plays Neil Fak in the show is a Canadian chef and restaurateur with three cookbooks to his name and a YouTube channel with around 1.5million subscribers.

The show is notoriously stressful to watch at times with the pressures of the professional kitchen seemingly portrayed accurately on screen. But is The Bear really true to life? Is the life of an ambitious chef really that hard, that dramatic?

To find out, I selected scenes from across the three seasons of The Bear and asked a panel of four UK chefs who have worked in Michelin-starred kitchens to compare them to their own experiences. The results were illuminating to say the least. What follows is the edited version of over five fours of interviews that together give a picture of what being a top chef in the UK is really like. A word of warning, if you are squeamish, you may want to skip the section on kitchen accidents. Click here to read Part two of this special edition.

Many thanks to Disney+ for providing all the great images from the show.

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The panel

Clockwise from top left: Ben Wilkinson, Marc Wilkinson, Mark Poynton and Matthew Tomkinson

Ben Wilkinson, head chef of The Pass, Horsham (1 Michelin star)
Ben reopened The Pass in August 2022. Within seven months the restaurant was awarded a Michelin star and four AA rosettes. He previously held a Michelin star at the Cottage in the Woods in the Lake District.

Mark Poynton, head chef Mark Poynton at Caistor Hall, Norwich and MJP@The Shepherds, Cambridge
Both of Mark’s current restaurants are Michelin Guide recommended. He previously held a Michelin star at Alimentum in Cambridge and was head chef at the two Michelin-starred Midsummer House, also in Cambridge. He has also published a cookbook, It’s Just Food.

Marc Wilkinson, chef/patron Fraiche, Oswestry
Marc held a Michelin star at Fraiche’s original location in Oxton. He relocated to a village near Oswestry in 2023 and now runs the restaurant in the converted ground floor of his home. The restaurant is featured in the Michelin and Good Food Guide.

Matthew Tomkinson, head chef, Stanwell House, Lymington
Matthew is a Roux Scholar and has held Michelin stars at The Goose in Britwell Salome, Oxfordshire and The Terrace at The Montagu Arms in the New Forest.

The scenes

Season 1 Ep2: In the opening scene chef David Fields (Joel McHale) is seen psychologically bullying Carmy telling him ‘You are talentless’. In the final episode of Season 3, Fields tells Carmy: "You were an okay chef when you started with me and you left an excellent chef, so you're welcome." Does it work like that? And if it does, is it morally justifiable? 

Ben: Kitchens did used to be quite abusive and aggressive and I just don't think it happens now. My generation of head chef are not behaving like that. Carmy’s character is probably the way a lot of my generation of head chefs feel. I've spoken with a few guys of similar age and they're like, we are not going to put people through what we went through.

I went down to London in 2000 and there were harsh, hard aggressive kitchens. There was bullying going on and it wouldn't necessarily come from the chef, you were getting it all through the sous. It was like the attack dog being set on you. It's a really weird thing when you end up in a kitchen like that because you get this Stockholm syndrome, you take the abuse and you think, oh yeah, whatever and when you come out of it after and you look back on it, you think, that was insane.

I definitely was a better chef after working for these people but it doesn't make you a better person. You come out of it broken and a bit damaged. I think I could have been an even better chef in a more supportive environment. You'd learn techniques, you learn recipes, but you could have learned that in a nicer environment. It wasn't that environment that did it.

That moment in the final episode of season three when Carmy is at the Ever ‘funeral dinner’ and he can’t take his eyes off Fields really hit home for me. I went to the AA awards one year and three tables away was my old head chef. I'd not seen him since the day I walked out of his restaurant and I was looking across thinking ‘I'm going to say hello to him. No, I can't. He probably hates me’. I spent a whole dinner looking across watching him. Finally, I went up to him at the bar and said ‘Congratulations on the five rosettes chef’ and he was so nice and he gave me a hug. But the feeling of seeing your tormenter across the room outside of the environment where you felt the abuse you had, that was very real.

Season 1 Ep3: Chef Stanley cuts her finger badly on a craft knife. What’s the worst accident has happened to you or that you’ve seen or in a professional kitchen?

Ben: I stabbed myself in the thigh with a boning knife. I was prepping. I dropped something on the floor, I bent up to pick it up, and as I stood up, I trapped the knife under the bench and I stood up, put my thigh into the knife, so that needed a couple of stitches. A guy was doing lemons on a meat slicer, so instead of using the part that holds whatever you’re slicing he was just holding it with his hand and he took all his fingertips off. Horrendous.

Matthew: I’ve only ever gone to hospital once. I was cutting chips with a serrated knife on a wet chopping board, and I slipped and I nearly cut the end of my finger off. I only got halfway through maybe. I had to go to the hospital because it wouldn't stop bleeding but I did go back to work that night. It's numb to this day and I’ve still got a scar there.

Another time I was frying beef cheeks. Someone came in and asked me something, I got distracted and the beef cheek dropped out of my tongs and landed in the hot fat, which was about a centimetre deep. It splashed fat all the way up the inside of my arm. I had this horrible blister that kept popping and catching on my clothes, but it wasn’t that bad really.

Mark P: Back in the day at Juniper in Altrincham with Paul Kitching, bless his soul, we never used to have kitchen porters so we washed up ourselves. Someone left knives in a sink full of soapy water and I went straight in. Within seconds the sink was full of blood. I pulled my hand out and I had two big gashes down my left index finger, which is still there to this day. I remember the sous chef saying to me, ‘Clean it up, get the hospital, get it stitched up and get back here before Paul gets in otherwise you won't have a job.’

That's not the worst that's happened to me. At Midummer House, after every service we used to take everything off the stoves and scrub them - they were still hot so it was quite difficult but we used to do that. One of the younger lads was helping me pull a pork stock off the stove, and this guy was a bit of a joker, a Jack the Lad. So I said to him, ‘On three, we're going to lift the stock up, pull it off, put it on the floor, and we're going to clean the stove.’ He’s like, ‘Yes chef’. I said, ‘One, two…’ and he lifted his side of the pot up and poured stock all over my hand.

Because it was pork stock there was quite a lot of fat in it which solidified and I was burnt all the way from my knuckles up to my wrist. I tried to carry on doing service but at the end of that night, I ended up going to A and E and was kept in hospital for a week on a drip. I had six weeks off work because of the burn.

Marc W: The worst I've seen is somebody falling backwards with a stock pot going over them. That was hospital, skin grafts and off work for about nine months. The worst thing to happen to me was that I thought the fryer basket was up and I went to grab it but it was in the oil. I was just in a panic in a service. That was excruciating, man. It was horrific, my hand blew up like a balloon but I'm very lucky my hand survived and you can't tell it happened now.

Season 1 Ep3: Carmy talks about a plum dish with four separate plum preparations that takes 12 people to prep. Have you ever created or served anything like that?

Ben:  Most of the dishes in any kitchen, they're going to come from multiple sections. It's not like one person's prepared one dish. It doesn't really work like that. So saying four people worked on this dish or whatever, it's not unusual. At The Pass we serve a beef and celeriac dish with beef fillet and cheek, smoked emulsion, a royale, hen of the woods mushrooms and truffle and all five of us in the kitchen do something for that dish - maybe not in service, but in the prep of it and the bread that goes with it. The list of components is huge.

'Celeriac' at The Pass

At Midsummer House there was the ‘17 pan lamb’. It took 17 pans to get it on the pass, which is just stupid. That was when it was a la carte so you could have a table of four with four different courses, and for one of those main courses, you have to use 17 pans to get the garnish up. It was just bonkers.

Marc W: Keep it simple, stupid. I just have to repeat it to myself, but I still stitch myself up. You can taste a dish in R&D and it can be stunning. Then you actually have to expedite it and you think, good grief what dickhead that wrote this? Oh, it's me. I've had a French salad on my menu recently which just threw me under the bus. I was peeling peas and doing a sorbet and compressing peaches and doing an infused goat’s curd - just so many components. I'm peeling peas, watching Alexander The Guest at 11pm on a day off. What's wrong with this picture?

Season 2 Ep 10: Carmy gets locked in the walk-in fridge. Could that happen in real life?
Matthew:  I have actually seen someone being locked in the fridge by accident. I don't really know how nowadays it can happen because they all have a release mechanism on the inside of the door. But sadly, that doesn't get you out if someone's put a bench in front of the fridge door. I've definitely seen that. I saw that more in France than in England. They're like school boys, chefs in France.

Season 1 Ep 4: Tina, the older more established chef at the restaurant doesn’t want to take direction or advice from Sydney the younger but more talented newcomer. Have you been in a similar position (as either the younger or older chef) and how did you handle it?  

Mark P: I was head chef at Midsummer House at the age of 25 and there was a lot of chefs coming in older than me that didn't want to listen to me. Similarly, when I took over at Alimentum I was 29 and 30, when I got a star there myself. There were 35 and 40-year-olds in the kitchen and they weren’t listening to me at all because they thought they knew better. I showed them I was the better chef by highlighting their mistakes and the reason that the restaurant wasn't working and why I was there to take over as head chef. That's the only way you can do it - by showing who you are as a person. It's not about doing it in a bad way or in a bullying way. It's just like, ‘You might be older, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're better. If you don't like it, you know where the door is’. The whole team at Alimentum left within the first six months.

Midsummer House was a different beast because a lot of people couldn't handle the pace of that kitchen anyway. We were on such a mission. Kitchens of that standard in London probably had 15 to 20 chefs. We had a core base of four or five chefs cooking two star food. When chefs come in the kitchen, they just couldn't keep up with us so they just organically left by themselves, ‘This is mad, I can't do this’. That's generally the way it was.

Ben: Probably the hardest thing to do, and I've done it, is when you go somewhere as a more senior chef. You go as sous chef and maybe there's some chef de parties there that thought they should have got the job, and they're just gunning for you from the off, trying to catch you out, trying to show you up.

I've hired a sous chef above someone who'd asked for the position, and you've just got to be aware that the sous chef's got to come in strong or they're going to get eaten alive by these people who are circling for their job.

Part two of Smashed’s The Bear Special is here. In the meantime, take advantage of the first-ever Smashed limited-time offer and get 25% off the price of an annual or monthly subscription, jsut click here by 16 August 2024 and keep reading to find out about our chefs’ worst kitchen disasters, how important restaurant reviews are to them, the sort of information they keep about their guests, why they have banned some of them and if, like Carmy, they re-write their menus daily.