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.
Subscription offer
Sections of both part one and two of this article are for subscribers only. Until Friday 16 August 2024, you can subscribe for a 25% discount on the usual monthly or annual subscription fee and read Smashed’s The Bear special in its entirety, get full access to the Smashed archive and all future subscriber-only content. Click here to take advantage of this limited-time offer.
The panel
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.
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.
Season 1 Ep5: Everything seems to go wrong for the restaurant including an exploding toilet and a power loss that means they have to serve food from a hastily erected outdoor BBQ. What’s the worst kitchen disaster you’ve endured?
Ben: I was working in a hotel in Darbyshire. I came in Sunday morning and there was no power. We had a hotel full of guests who had just had their wedding the day before and wanted breakfast. So the solution was that the owner reversed his camper van to the kitchen door and I cooked breakfast for 30-odd people in it. We had a little generator that could only run either the kettle or the toaster or a little grill. So I had the three plugs and swapped them over and over to toast bread, boil water and cook bacon on the little grill, all at the same time. You just find a way to do it.
Matthew: I remember at a pub years ago, cooking on gas for four days and we didn't have any power. Imagine that now, with no fridges and stuff, it just wouldn’t happen. I don’t know about electics but they had this box on the wall. They took it out and found three mice that had been electrocuted and that's what was causing the problem.
Mark P: Only last week I had to unblock two urinals in the middle of a Saturday service at MJP@ The Shepherds. It's a 500 year old building, and quite often if it rains really hard for any extended amount of time, we have leaks, which are quite impossible to fix. We just have to move tables and put buckets out.
Marc W: The power going down in the middle of a service at Fraiche with a full house was probably the worst. It was just so difficult. We had gas, but no electric. It was in house, it wasn't a grid thing. Something was tripping the whole board constantly. I was just running around like an idiot, unplugging every single thing in the building and meanwhile, all the customers are sat there and that was horrible. I couldn’t even print a bill. It took me 30-40 minutes to discover it was one of the garden lights. People were understanding but that was one to try and forget.
Season 1 Ep 7 and Season 3 Ep 4, Ep 5 and Ep 9: In each of these episodes, restaurant reviews and restaurant critics have a significant impact on the storyline. In the first season, the restaurant gets a review but focuses on Sydney’s dish rather than Carmy’s. In the third season, Neil Fak hangs pictures of Chicago’s food writers and bloggers on the office wall, Ritchie scrambles to prepare the dining room for a Chicago Tribune photo shoot for their forthcoming review and Cicero tells Carmy that he’ll have to “cut the fucking string” on his investment if the Chicago Tribune gives them a bad review. Are critics and influencers really taken that seriously in real life?
Mark P: They'll always be important. It gets your name out to people, if it's good or bad. I had an amazing one from Tracey MacLeod followed six months later by a shocking one from AA Gill, bless his soul. I think he got refused a place at Cambridge Uni so he had a bee in his bonnet about the city. He sat in the window at Alimentu, watching all these students go past being really, really angry. His whole two pages in the Sunday Times was about how Cambridge is a cloned city. It's a shit town. The students are crap and the end of it said, by the way, Mark's food is amazing and gave me one out of five. But it filled the restaurant up for about six months.
Marc W: I think there’s a bit of over-dramatisation in the show on that, I don’t think that’s real life. If we know there’s an inspector, it's just more a case of, well, we're cooking at this level, the service is at this level, so this is what we do. Why are we cleaning just for this review? We should be cleaning the restaurant anyway. The kitchen should be clean. So yeah, I think it's just a bit focusing on the drama and the impact the review will have on the plot.
Ben: They're not taken lightly. If we know we've got a reviewer coming, we're aware of it, the team are aware of it, and while we wouldn't say, ‘you've got to give them special treatment’, there's definitely like a third check where normally there's a double check and you're just saying, ‘is this spot on?’, especially with bloggers when you know they're going to be taking photos of the food. That's the worst thing. You see a photo of your food and it's not exactly what you normally do.
Season 1 Ep 8: Sydney says she worked in one place for eight months and all the chef would let her do was zest stuff - have you ever experienced anything similar?
Matthew: I remember when I won the Roux scholarship and I was on my stage with Michel Guérard at Les Pres d'Eugenie in France peeling peas. I expected this bag of pea pods to come and a bag of peas came. You just peeled the outside off and they made a puree with them to go on this sea bass dish. However, when you peel a pea, they are delicious. When you dress them with olive oil and some lemon and season them, you could eat them by the bucketful.
Mark P: I’ve made people do it. I used to make people peel asparagus, that sort of stuff, just because it was easier to get them to do a job that was tedious. That means you didn't have to do it and you had more time to concentrate on other stuff. For me, it's not about trying to break people or anything like that. It's about, I've got a really shit job to do. It's 10 kilos of girolles that all need prepping down, so you know what? You can do that job.
Season 2 Ep 2: Carmy shows Sydney the sign language for sorry (rubbing your fist in circles around your heart) and says that's the way that the chefs would indicate that they didn't mean what they were shouting at each other during a stressful service. Would that ever happen in a real kitchen?
Ben: There's something in that. I don't think you'd have a sign for it, sometimes just a look across the kitchen is enough. I've been bollocked in front of the whole kitchen by a sous chef that I got on with and that I'd go for drinks with. At some point, they'd come and speak to you and say, ‘Listen, you had to get it today, you’re all right, aren't you?’ What happens in service is not personal, it’s professional.
Season 2 Ep 7: Richie is staging front of house at high end restaurant Ever and is told that the restaurant keeps information on which diners eat slowly, which ones have special dietary restrictions, who’s got a birthday and which patrons are arseholes. Does that happen in real life?
Mark P: Yeah, a hundred per cent. Customers, we database the whole lot, always have done since Alimentum. It's an easier way of doing things. If we know ‘John’ likes table five and he likes his bottled water room temperature and his chardonnay ice cold it just makes the customer experience better. New customers that we don't know we will Google to see where they work and stuff like that.
Customers can have a bad day just as we can have a bad day, so we wouldn't necessarily red flag somebody just because they were an arsehole for one day. If they are repeatedly arseholes, we block them from the booking system so they can't book again. They have to ring us to book a table and we just tell them we’re fully booked, so they don't feel hard done by.
Marc W: We have a database with birthdays, anniversaries, dislikes and allergies. And then we have the blacklist of course. Just because you’re paying doesn’t mean you can be rude or disrespectful. There was a case where people wanted exclusive use of the whole restaurant. They decided to have a food fight, then one person threw up over a wall and another person broke the toilet. We had to have the carpets professionally cleaned, we had to repaint the dining room and the toilet had to be replaced. So they went on the list, for obvious reasons.
Season 3 EP 2: Carmy’s list of “non-negotiables” includes writing the menu daily. Would that ever happen in a real Michelin-starred restaurant?
Ben: No, I just don't believe it's possible. Things take more than a day to get ready. You can't make a sauce in a day. Even ordering - we don’t get deliveries from all our suppliers every day, so you have to have some sort of plan ahead of time of what's happening. Consistency-wise, there's no way that my team is good enough to do something new every day. It takes weeks for them to get up to speed when we put a new dish on to get to the point where I'm happy to let them just do it on their own.
I'll get my veg supply saying, oh, we've got some really nice such and such, and I just change the menu for however long we've got that thing and then change it back again. But no one's writing a menu every day on the day. I don't believe that at all.
Matthew: I would never want to work somewhere where the menu changes daily. I hate specials on the menu. Specials are not special. Specials are: well, that might work, let's try. I want to practice dishes. I'm definitely guilty of trying to be a perfectionist and keeping things back. There is a point where you have to release it but I believe that there's always something around the corner that can influence what you are doing and change something for the better and you've got to try and give enough of a window of opportunity to embrace that.
The idea of changing every day for Michelin seems madness to me. None of them do that. You look at Core or any of the big names - you see those dishes being banged out to hundreds and hundreds of people because their good. It's not easy to find those dishes that are ‘match winners’ as we used to call them at Ockenden, that are just delicious, everything all works together well and guests love them and they look good. Once you've got a few of them, you want to let them earn their keep for a little bit.
Marc W: There's no set formula for getting the star but the key element has got to be consistency. If you're doing daily changing menus, then you're risking your consistency, so why would you do that?
Season 3 Ep 5: Carmy is seen standing in a dumpster breaking down cardboard boxes. Would a head chef do that in real life?
Ben: Yeah. It's like a ‘lead from the front’ kind of thing. I’ve crawled up into extractions, stripped down to my vest. Washing dishes and scrubbing, absolutely everyone gets involved with that. There's not many places where the head chef doesn’t. I wouldn't expect Hélène Darroze or Claude Bosi to be doing it because I think they've got head chefs that are running their kitchens for them. But people like me, I'm genuinely working in my restaurant every day that it's open. Taking the bins out, scrubbing the floor, it's all part of the job.
I'm also really fussy about what equipment I want to use. I've got pans that I like, spoons that I like, trays that I like. We've got our own storage tubs, storage pots that fit in the fridge nicely, that sort of thing. I’m a bit anal about it, and if I put them into the general hotel pot wash, I never find them again. So the deal is I have to wash those things that I want just to be mine myself, so a sink full of pots is normal for us.
Marc W: I clean toilets, I clean the guest bedroom, the en suite. I do the laundry, I do the ironing for the bedding, I do the ironing for the napkins. I do the garden. I brush the drive before service. I have a white pebble path in between slate and I just check that there's no loose pebbles. I check there’s no bird muck on the gate to the property. If there’s a blocked drain, I’m down there. I do all the maintenance and all the painting here. Cooking is only a part of it.
Click here to read Smashed’s The Bear special pt. 2
Yes, chef!