Smashed: How true to life is The Bear? (pt.2)

Michelin chefs give their verdict

In the second part of this Smashed The Bear special, our panel of Michelin chefs continue to compare scenes from all seasons of the critically acclaimed comedy-drama TV series that’s set in the world of fine dining restaurants to their own lived experience. 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. Read part one here.

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 Ep3: The hapless Sydney drops a whole container of veal stock. What’s your worst kitchen mishap?

Mark P: Cleaning the deep fat fryer is a classic one. There's a valve on the bottom that you open to let the dirty oil out. Then you close the valve, fill the fryer with hot water, and clean it all out. A lot of people then forget to turn the valve back on when you put the clean oil in and it goes all over the kitchen floor. Or they try and drain the hot dirty oil into a plastic container and it melts the container.

Ben: The classic one is you ask someone to pass the stock for you and they keep the bones and throw the water away. I worked at the Hilton on Park Lane, and there was a team that came in to clean the kitchen every night. We had big bratt pans that we'd leave stocks cooking in. You'd have a chicken stock or veal stock cooking all day - you’d come in the next day and the pan’s just sparkling, it's all gone. If you didn't put a note on it saying ‘Do Not Clean’, they'd just empty it out.

I worked in the pastry section at a restaurant in Holland and I’d get in at 5am to do the breakfast and then do the baking. I came in one morning, opened the walk-in fridge and it was two centimetres deep in raspberry coulis. Someone had vac-packed it slightly warm, so all the bags had burst in the fridge. When I opened the door it just flooded out. I didn't have time to clean it because I had to get set up for breakfast. By the time I’d finished, there were raspberry coulis footprints all around the whole kitchen that I then had to mop up.

Matthew: At a pub I was working at we had an Italian evening and we'd made these four huge vats of sauce, tomato, bechamel and whatever they were. I went to put one in the fridge and the clips on the shelf broke and it must've been eight litres of red, white and brown sauce just flooded across the kitchen floor. All that work gone.

At Ockenden Manor, in the pastry section we used to have a bag of flour kept on the floor under the mixing machine. We used to say to the kitchen porters, do not mop around it. Anyway, occasionally the bag would get a little bit wet. You’d come to pick the bag up, the bottom would rip and kilos of flour would just go everywhere.

Season 1 Ep 5: Ritchie is seen dealing drugs from the restaurant. Have you ever been in a restaurant where that has happened? 

Mark P: Not dealing. I've had chefs take drugs, come to shift on drugs and take drugs on shift while I've been in charge, and I've sacked them immediately. There's no tolerance for that at all, but it does happen.

Season1 Ep 6: Pastry chef Marcus takes to sleeping at the restaurant so he can perfect his recipe for doughnuts. Have you ever worked such long hours that you’ve ended up sleeping at any of the restaurants you’ve worked in?
Ben: You wouldn't let a chef stay overnight on their own in the kitchen but I have done a couple of nights when we were prepping for a full menu change that had to be ready for lunch service the next day. So you stay. It wasn't really necessary. We were kind of young and stupid. You think it's a cool thing to do but the next day you're absolutely useless. Quite a common thing, if you had a ridiculous job that just takes ages, people would take it home - sit on the sofa and pick a bunch of thyme down into individual leaves and then bring it into work the next day.

Mark P: When we first started making sourdough properly at Midsummer House, we spent days and days trying to perfect it - different hydrations and all that sort of stuff. Quite often we'd start work at 7 or 8 am and still be there 5 or 6 am the next morning trying to get it right and then going straight into the next service.

The orange cheesecake was the same. We used to temper chocolate, dip a blown-up balloon into the chocolate, wait for the chocolate to set, pop the balloon, fill it with a cheesecake mix with popping candy and serve it. But for the love of God, we couldn't get the balloons to hold while dipping them in the chocolate, they just used to explode everywhere so chefs would be covered in chocolate. We spent many a night trying to get that right instead of just putting it in the bin.

Daniel Clifford opened a pub called The Headley in Brentwood in Essex. At the time, Midsummer House was getting refurbed so the whole restaurant team went down to the pub, ripping walls out, setting up the kitchen up and so on. Daniel was obsessed with having a curved bar that went round the whole of a semi-circular wall. The carpenters refused and said it would have to be blocked in and be square on if they were going to keep on budget and to schedule. Daniel was like, ‘Well, fuck it. You go home then.’ And he said to the team, ‘we're going to stay tonight and we're going to build the bar’. So we did.

Bear in mind, we'd driven from Cambridge in the morning at 7 am, got there, worked all day, knocking walls out, ripping furniture up, trying to build a kitchen and write recipes for the team and all that sort of stuff. We worked right through from 7 am Monday morning until 10 pm Tuesday night, straight through without sleep to get this bar built. Then we went home and were back at 7 am Wednesday morning.

Season 1 Ep 8: Carmy says that when someone new came into the kitchen to work, he would look at them like it was a competition and he was going to destroy them. Is that a behaviour or attitude that you recognise among chefs? 

Ben: There's definitely competition about who's the fastest, who's the strongest. You hear these stories sometimes of people throwing each other's prep away just to mess them em up. I've never worked anywhere like that because the collective suffering from that happening is too big, but there might be times when you let someone make a mistake. You could have saved them but let them drown a little bit. It’s a competitive environment.

Marc W: I’d always want to see what can I learn from these people. Especially if they come from a good house. I’d be like a sponge. I’d sidle up next to them during prep and say, ‘Tell me about your time at Le Gavroche’. Just get anecdotes and exposure to what it was like there and what they learned and see if I could learn things from them. I never set out to destroy anyone.

Season 1 Ep 8: Sydney cooks on her day off. Do you ever cook at home on your days off?
Ben: Sometimes you do it because you just want to enjoy cooking for a bit. I love cooking with a glass of wine, and obviously I can't do that at work. So taking all day to make a nice meal for me and my girlfriend - I've got the music on and just plodding about the kitchen, really enjoying what I'm doing, yeah I definitely do that. But then there's other times that you can't even face the thought of cooking on your day off and it's like, ‘cheese and biscuits today’.

Marc W: Toast, does that count? Do you mean cooking a meal that you see on Chef’s Table where they've got a barbecue in the garden and everyone’s there sitting in the sunset? Never happened. I rarely use takeaways but at the same time I don’t cook wagyu for my tea. You just cook basic food. Put your eggs on toast. Nice bread, nice free range eggs, nice butter. I wouldn't cook anything like a cook at work. It would be too time-consuming.

Season 2 Ep 7: While on his stage, Ritchie has to polish forks to perfection. Would he be made to do that in real life?

Marc W: That was one of my favourite episodes. It pulls back the curtain on what the monotony is like in this type of environment, and how anal we are. A young girl came for an interview to wash up. I asked her if she knew how wash glasses. She said she did, showed me, and I said, ‘You don't how to wash glasses. I’ll teach you how to wash a glass.’ It's just like this anal procedure you have, but there's a reason for it all.

I polish cutlery every night when we're open, I polish glasses every night when we're open, it's my job. It's taking pride in ensuring standards. You either raise your competency to this level or you're not part of us. In the show, Ritchie doesn’t get it at first, but that is real life. I just love that. That portrays it very well.

Subscribe now to find out what happens when a service goes wrong, the physical toll the professional kitchen has taken on our chefs, how their families felt about them going into hospitality, what they spend on luxury ingredients, how they make money from a dish and how to clean a kitchen with a toothpick.

Season 1 Ep3: A lunch service goes badly wrong and chefs are seen yelling at each other in an open kitchen in front of customers. Have you ever had a service like that?

Ben: Most of the kitchens that I've been in, the head chef and sous chef would never allow arguing amongst the team. You would never argue amongst yourselves, that would get stamped out straight away. As soon as there was any hint of two people about to go at it, it'll be stopped. But services can definitely go bad. Absolutely.

Mark P: I've seen it in hotels because everyone thinks they're in charge of their own little bit. If you're not pulling your weight on your bit, then someone's going to have a go at you. In restaurants, there's generally only one or two voices that will be the shouting, which would be the chef or the head chef. If anyone else raises their voice, they just get kicked out of the kitchen.

Marc W: It’s never happened in my own kitchen, but I know for example, there's a restaurant in London that is an open kitchen, and the chef just lashes into the staff in front of the guests. Fellow chefs are like, ‘Well, it was quite amusing, things got heated’. But then I have guests sat at the table here last week that told me, ‘Oh my God, it was awful. We just wanted to leave. He just start this parade of abuse on one of the young cooks right in front of us, and the atmosphere just plummeted.’

Season 1 Ep 8: Carmy talks about working in a professional kitchen and says ‘I cut myself, skin dry and oily at the same time, callouses on my fingers from the knives and my stomach was fucked’. Have you suffered physical issues from working long hours in the kitchen?

Mark P: I’m 44 this year and I’ve been in professional kitchens since I was 15. About 10 years ago, I started to suffer really bad swelling in my knees and I’ve been diagnosed with osteoarthritis in both knees. I was given a lot of different drugs to take the swelling down so I could work. Certain types of anti-inflammatories ripped a hole in my stomach. About 18 months ago, I spent a week in hospital bleeding internally. Now I have to have steroid injections in my knees every six months because I'm not allowed to take anti-inflammatories ever again in my life. I take tramadol when it's really bad or if it's really, really bad, I take morphine, prescribed by the doctor. So yeah, I'm a walking heroin addict. It just tells you how brutal the work can be.

Matthew: My hands are calloused, and it's a bit of a joke in the kitchen that there's not really that much I can't pick up on my bare hands. I've always worn the burns and callouses as a bit of a badge of honor, if I'm honest. I don't really mind it. And it's just part of the deal. I think there's got to be a point where you do start to wear the nature of the work on you after a certain amount of years.

Marc W: Among other things I’ve got three hernias. I went to the doctor and said can you do all the hernias in one go so I can go back to work? They just look at you like you’re an alien. They said, alright we'll do two hernias in one hit and I said I’d take that. It’s a really demanding job and now I really feel it.

Season 2 Ep 2: Sydney’s father doesn’t consider cheffing to be a serious career choice and tells her to remember ‘Cousin Monty always has a job for you at Boeing’. Were your family and friends supportive of your career choice or was hospitality looked down upon?  

Matthew: My mom and dad have been nothing but complimentary and supportive. I was going to do Psychology at University and I decided to do catering. My parents were called in for school to discuss it, and my mum said, ‘I'd rather him be happy than swinging from a tree doing something he doesn't want’. So she was quite aware of men's health before it was the thing to be aware of.

They've always worried about the hours and the commitment but when the star came it was like, okay, it's good. I think they also worry about what's going to happen in later life, a little bit about what the future looks like as a chef, how do you maintain income and what does the work look like? But I think no matter what I did for a living, they'd feel the same.

My brother always thought I was an idiot. He did a British Gas engineering apprenticeship and early doors was earning quite well. He would used to say, ‘What are you doing Matt? I'm earning three times what you are’. But as the years went by, my earnings outgrew his. Now he cooks a lot and he thinks it’s brilliant I'm a chef.

Mark P: My dad is just about to retire. I’ve been a chef since I was 15, I own two restaurants that turn over nearly £3million and my dad still thinks I do a ‘ladies' job. I think that answers it, doesn't it?

Season 3 EP 3: Cicero storms into the kitchen and gives Carmy a hard time about his $11,268 butter order. Have you ever had an issue where a restaurant owner has questioned the cost of ingredients or wanted you to use cheaper alternatives? 

Ben: If you're opening a restaurant and you're going for Michelin from the start, the expectation is that you're going to be losing money till you get that star. It is just a fact. You cannot charge enough. People won't pay the price for the stuff that you are selling. You're overstaffed generally for the amount of covers that you're doing because you've got your eyes on the prize. When you get that Michelin star it changes overnight. The restaurant's going to be full. You can put the prices up, but to get to there, it's going to cost you. The question is how deep are the investor's pockets? How long can you sustain it until you make the breakthrough?

All of a sudden the restaurant is a profitable business, but you've got to be set up to do that. You can't say, ‘Oh, we've got a Michelin star yesterday, we need to hire three more chefs’, it's not going to happen. At The Cottage in The Woods when we got the first Michelin star, we filled the restaurant for the next three months. The day after it got announced, the phone just rang off the hook; emails, you couldn't answer fast enough. It's such an impact and you've got to be ready for it. If you're not prepared, all these people coming in with high expectations are getting let down because you can't handle the workload.

Matthew: All the kitchens I've worked in have a gross profit target which is measured monthly. If you were spending £11,000 pounds on butter, but you were charging enough for it, it'd be okay. But I've never worked anywhere where it's, ‘just buy what you want and it's okay’.

It’s about bang for buck. We use Flying Fish which in my opinion is the best seafood in the country. They're not cheap, but I think that on the plate it delivers the bang for buck. If I'm putting a piece of turbot on, I might stay clear of having it with extremely expensive garnishes to try and make the money I’ve spent on it worthwhile. But I'd be very careful about managing the cost of a dish all the time, rather than just letting it get away from itself. I wouldn't have a job if I did that.

The problem is, the harder you work your ingredients and try and keep your costs down, the more labour you need. If you buy a piece of beef fillet and cut it into eight and put it in the fridge, it's done, it’s ready. If you buy in a short rib, you've got to braise it and make a stock for it - all those things that go down that road are going to require labour. Your short rib will make you more money, but your fillet will cost less to produce labour-wise. So I’ve always thought about the balance of the two. If you're going to put something special on the menu, you charge appropriately and let people understand why.

The dark art is making a dish appear generous and at the same time, managing your profits. The things that sell really well can damage you more if they're not making their keep profit-wise, they're the ones that are hurting you. You need to keep a balance but in hospitality, you can never be mean.

Marc W: A big number for me is my caviar order which might be £800. My order from Wilshire Truffles can be £1000. When you think I do eight covers, it's substantial. I make sure I never waste truffle. If it's getting soft then I make a truffle butter and roll it and freeze it or I'll make a truffle-infused something so that there's zero wastage. The caviar is weighed with a drug dealer scale. I calculate opening the tins based on how many covers are booked for that week. I have to include breakfast because if they're on the tasting breakfast, then they get caviar. So when it comes to the end of the week, they’ll be empty tins.

I think the point they’re making in the show is how a chef, if not controlled, can be a little bit irresponsible financially. I probably look at it a different way now than when I was younger and just cheffing because it’s my money. Then I wanted sweetbreads from France and Pyrenean milk-fed lamb. You just want all the good gear. I'm still not great. My accountant said to me, ‘Your gross profit is shocking Marc, what the hell are you doing now?’ I'm like, ‘Yeah, but the truffles are great.’

Season 2 Ep 8: Carmy shows the beautiful drawings he has done of his ideas for dishes to Sydney. Do you ever plan out dishes on paper first? 

Mark P: Everything starts with a sketch and then we work from that. It starts with one ingredient, usually a vegetable, and then we work backwards from that - what we can do with it, how we can manipulate it, how we can process it, what protein is going to go with it, and then how we'd like to think it's going to look on a plate. Then try and present a dish like that.

Matthew:  I tend not to have been image led in my mind's eye. When I was learning to put dishes together it was always about the dish rather than what it would look like. We'd usually engineer its appearance once we got it on the menu and see it a few times and then look at it properly as time's gone by.

Season 1 Ep2: Pastry chef Marcus is seen cleaning the stove with a toothbrush. Would anything like that happen in real life?

Ben: That’s quite common. You'd be toothbrushing nooks and crannies or using cocktail sticks to get into the little creases where the stainless steel folds or around buttons around switches. Deep cleaning in good kitchens is like a competitive sport; who can get their section the shinest - polishing, solid tops and all that sort of thing. It's serious business and there's a lot of pride in having the section looking spotless. I remember at the old Petrus on St. James, every couple of days we used to have to make vinegar, flour and salt solution and we'd polish all the gas pipes behind the stove so it was shiny and then just push the stoves back in front of them.

Mark P: I haven't seen it on a stove because I'd imagine the toothbrush would melt but certainly grouting on tiles and areas of the floor a normal scrubbing brush won’t get into. I've done it and I've told people to get down there and scrub things a bit harder and cleaner. In top-end kitchens it has to be a good clean kitchen because everything has to be the best it can be.

Marc W:  I’ve got a denture toothbrush and cotton buds in the drawer, but not for cleaning the stove. It’s for when I’m doing something intricate like the chocolate machine, trying to get inside the baffles and stuff that's just hard to reach. I remember we used to clean the kitchen at one place I worked and you'd have to stand by your station and the stoves and that you would be inspected before you left. If there was any water stains or streaks on the side of the stove, chef could throw a full bin and waste over it and you’d have to do it again.

The idea of doing the deep clean where you clean absolutely everything on a Saturday night, and you get out at 3 or 4 am in the morning, it's just stupid. So when I first became head chef, I said, we do it every night - we break it down a little bit. If we're going to clean the extraction properly, fully breaking it down, we'll do it on a Thursday night, so it was not this four o'clock in the morning lark when you finish. It's just crazy.

Click here to read pt.1 of Smashed’s The Bear special