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.

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