Cook like The Bear: We tried to make the show’s signature dishes
We attempt our own twists on Carmy and Syd’s fine dining
The Bear deserves to be in the conversation as one of the best TV shows of the 21st century - if not all time - alongside The Wire, Fleabag, The Studio and Severance but I think it might also be my favourite show. Which is something else entirely. Christopher Storer’s five-seasons-and-a-movie is funny and stressful and sweet and chaotic. It’s a hang-out show, a foodie show, a competence porn show and a grief show.
Sure, it’s not always perfect: those restaurant industry cameos aren’t always the most natural, hey. But when The Bear slaps, it really slaps. Richie singing along to Taylor Swift in his car in Forks? Carmy melting down cos he’s stuck in the fridge? The “I’m not like this because I’m in Van Halen, I’m in Van Halen because I’m like this.” The beef, the sauce, the snow, THE FAKS. Pure television magic.
Beyond the iconic shouty scenes and the calming kitchen montages, the show’s whole project of taking a group of pretty normal, working-class people and seeing what they’re capable of, with the right care, attention, time, money and ambition, is also just really fucking moving, too. Look at where Sydney, Tina, Marcus, Sweeps, Ebra, Richie - even Neil! my heart - start in the first episode and where they end up. (I think Richie’s S1-2 is possibly my fave character arc of all time, kudos to Ebon Moss-Bachrach for his magnificent performance).
Storer’s genius, bringing us back to that walk-in fridge, is to set all this in contrast to both Mikey, who gave most of them work in the first place, and his brother Carmy, the character who sees all their potential but has an intensely love-hate relationship with being a chef himself. The post that’s doing the rounds on social media of the first and last stills of Carmen Berzatto’s face in the series says it all.
The Bear is also the thing that made me start to think I’d been wrong about food. I’ve always had quite a lot of fun declaring to friends with better (culinary) taste than me that food can’t be art. It’s too practical and functional for starters: like Brian Eno says, a knife handle can be art but not the blade itself. You. Eat. It. Without it, we starve etc. And the people who pay silly money to eat in tyre-starred restaurants are just elitist wankers. Food isn’t democratic enough to be a true, universal artform. Poor people can’t access the best stuff at cheapo-cheapo prices, unlike books, cinema, music, theatre. OK, a Van Gogh might cost millions but you can probably go see it for free in a public museum. So food might be pretty, it might taste new and innovative and it might be pretentious but it simply does not equal art.
Then I watched The Bear. I watched the Berzattos, and the people they gathered around them, make food for each other “family style” before each shift in the restaurant. I watched Carmy and Syd make the same dishes over and over, illustrating them, tweaking them, tasting them, perfecting them, teaching them. I watched Tina and Marcus get schooled in fancy cooking and pastry techniques; Sweeps developing his sommelier tastebuds and “cousin” Richie mastering the delicate arts of conversation, ambience and front-of-house hospitality with his surprise-and-delight specials.
Most of all, these characters - who made me laugh a lot and I wanted to hang out with - were expressing themselves, their ideas, family histories, relationships through the dishes they were dreaming up and then making real. Sydney’s Coca Cola-braised short ribs, Marcus’ box of mints, Carmy’s seven fishes.
Shit, maybe food is art.
For sure, part of it was the novelty of watching these processes: I’ve never really watched Masterchef, Bake Off or any cooking shows unless someone else has it on and so, I’ve lost the TV battle. Another element is that The Bear’s packaging around these ‘food stories’ is much more my thing - rather than awkward conversations, regional British accents and pat sob stories, The Bear offered up rapid-fire screwball scripts, an immaculate soundtrack, editing that swings and subtle blink and you miss them call-backs which reward conscientious viewers like me. It’s all my jam.
The Bear hasn’t turned me into a chef-in-training or anything. And I’m still very much a future candidate for a robot cook. And yet, something shifted. A few years ago, I got intrigued by the whole endeavour. I started cooking by myself, for myself (with some Hello Fresh help) and actually enjoying it for the first time in my life. Essentially, kinda like how standing in front of Rothko’s Yellow Square, tipsy, at the Royal Academy one night unlocked the abstract expressionists for me, The Bear unlocked food for me, after decades of not getting it.
Two other things increased my food-is-art suspicion around the same time: Roadrunner, the 2022 Netflix doc about Anthony Bourdain which is genuinely inspiring, despite how it all ends and Tran Anh Hung’s beautiful 2023 film The Taste of Things, which shifted my perspective on the thorny ‘women doing the cooking’ feminist quagmire of it all. The film made me want to try out some of the course-making. The doc just made it all look quite rock ‘n’ roll, creative and world-expanding. Of course, I’m sure Pixar’s seminal 2007 masterpiece Ratatouille laid some of the structural framework for all of this deep contemplation in my mind.
Just to be clear - and very much SPOILER ALERTS from now on - Sugar and Richie have a chat late on in Season 5 about how $190 feels like a special occasion dinner but $200 is pushing it too far. So I could very much not afford to go to the fictional Chicago restaurant The Bear (unless I’m not paying). And when someone is sitting in the other room getting hungry, cooking still very much feels like a chore to be completed before steam starts coming out the top of my head like a Looney Tune, rather than an act of expression. But this TV show about small, ordinary transformations also had a small, ordinary transforming effect on me and a pretty unexpected one.
All of which is to say, to honour the show’s finale (which phew, sticks the landing with some characteristically lovely moments) I made six of The Bear’s signature dishes. Bear in mind, I’m much better at writing than cooking. Every second counts.
Sydney’s French Omelette for Sugar
OK in season 2, episode 9, Natalie ‘Sugar’ Berzatto is knackered and pregnant and bumps into Sydney. Syd’s like “let me make you something” and what she makes is this awesome french omelette with yummy Boursin inside. The omelette gets to the heart of literally nourishing someone you care about with food you’ve prepared. So simple and sweet. Again, something I used to think of as maybe slightly retrograde and to be avoided getting sucked into if you’re a good feminist who doesn’t want to get stuck in the kitchen.
Syd’s omelette is a perfect little ‘elevated’ dish, you know, that feels achievable but also on rewatch of the ep, there’s bougie but fun details like Sydney carefully rubbing butter along the top of her slim, folded up omelette, before finishing it off with chopped-up chives and broken-up sour and onion crisps sprinkled over the plate.
Even I couldn’t fuck this one up. My sister did say my first attempt was perhaps a little pale but definitely cooked enough to still be tasty. I followed this recipe - there are tons of people’s versions and tweaks of The Bear recipes online by now.
Confession: I did have to go with Pringles as the Big Sains didn’t have any other sour cream and onion-flavoured crisps but you know what, they worked. I stuck plenty of Boursin in there. And I used two eggs rather than three, just personal preference. Sydney’s French Omelette is quick, light, delicious and feels a bit special. Low effort, high reward.
The Original Beef of Chicagoland Sandwich
Hoo boy, this was a bit of a production but worth it and I couldn’t not do the OG braised-beef sandwich.
First of all, it’s a ‘cook the night before and then fridge it overnight’ situation, a fact which reminded me that I should always read through the whole recipe - in this case the LA Times version - at the start rather than randomly guessing how long things take…. Soooooahh, second, I’m not spending £12 on beef sirloin and risking drama and disaster so I enlisted my sister again to take care of flipping the beef in the pan. While she did that, I added all the herbs and spices and whatnot - oregano, dried basil, chilli flakes, paprika etc - into the sauce/jus/broth.
This and the chicken piccata felt the most like quote-unquote cooking of the whole lot, for the sheer amount of jars I had going, plus some shallot (a swap-in for onion), garlic and beef stock. Then our beef went in the oven for an hour, cooled down on the side before it was time to go in the fridge overnight.
I had a train to catch the next day so I had real Berzatto bro energy as I sliced the hunk o’ beef into thin strips and put the whole thing back in a pan on the hob again for ten minutes. Baguette, beef in, spoon over the sauce, my take on giardinieri on top, wrap it up and boom - an elite train sandwich. Plenty left for the rest of the fam who said that it was good, “like really good”. Could I be living my life like this all the time?
Mikey’s Family Spaghetti (Carmy’s Version)
So Mikey’s spaghetti sauce famously only has four ingredients: basil, tomatoes, oil and 10 cloves of garlic. San Marzano tomatoes and the small cans taste better, specifically. Like if you finally open up the cans, as Carmy does at the end of Season 1, you might find Mikey’s secret restaurant-saving cash stash. So I was pretty stoked when we found small tins of San Marzano tomatoes at the supermarket; suddenly it wasn’t an intimidating suburban soul-drain but a magical place full of treasures. Result!
Then I remembered Carmy’s version of his brother’s recipe, which adds butter and onion and I danced back and forth between the two - even after I started! - about which version to do. (My allegiance to this fictional family needs to be studied.) I went with Carmy’s in the end because I was cooking for others. Turns out that after you halve the onion, fry them, then leave them in the tomato sauce while it simmers for 20 minutes - you Take Them Out before you serve. Thank you for your service, onions. Italian cooking!
The ‘fancy’ bit of this recipe involved pureeing the basil (pre-soaked in olive oil, so chic) and smashed garlic with a handheld food processor - mine still looked quite bitty so I strained it too - then adding this oil to the tomato sauce midway through the simmer sesh. While I was perfecting my sauce, because with quick-cook spaghetti what else was I gonna do, I took what I reckon is my most Bear-coded pic, of the San Marzanos bubbling away in the pan with big dollops all around on the hob. You can feel the heat coming off it, right. My chef’s whites ( a t-shirt) was also pretty destroyed.
Less chic and more basic: the sauce was tasting a little acidic so instead of baking soda, I did add some sugar at the end: listen, I had dinner guests. Tastefully sized portions and a few basil leaves to garnish: another quick-ish success. Oh and bonus, I accidentally made enough for like a week.
Carmy’s Chicken Picatta Masterclass
Another classic Season 1 callback, Carmy teaches The Beef’s staff how to make a perfect Italian lemon chicken picatta pretty early on. A couple of things: carefully slicing chicken breasts in half horizontally (rather than, say, dicing them) and then bashing them flat felt super cheffy, similar to rubbing the salt and pepper on the beef for the sandwich. I’m not a huge meat-eater, particularly at home, so that was interesting to discover. And, obviously, it means they fry way quicker.
For the sauce, it was lemons, capers, shallots, chicken stock, grapeseed oil, white wine, butter and garlic - I followed this recipe - and to finish, parsley sprinkled on top. For my first batch of parsley, I did chop before I took the stalks off because this instruction was not in the recipe - fail. I also made my Mum hyperventilate with laughter over a misunderstanding about how many stock pots I needed.
Otherwise, it all went without a hitch, if it took ages as all my cooking does, but when I plated the picatta up with some new potatoes and greens and took my first bite of chicken: all I could taste was lemon. I’d completely forgotten to taste-test it towards the end, horror-show. All was not lost though, it was a little on the lemony side overall but you could still taste all the other flavours and it got thumbs ups around the table. With both this lemon chicken piccata and the simple-ish spag, I could see myself trying out new versions of these too. (Food is art/ is food art?) Lessons, lessons everywhere.
The Haribo-Style Plum Gelée
One example of Carmy’s NYC kitchen lore that he shares with dessert chef Marcus is the plum gelée that took a year to perfect, requires veal fat to get the Haribo-style consistency right and takes twelve people to prep. I’d not made jelly since I was a kid so I thought I’d try a simplified version with, for instance, no Japanese plum wine and unsalted butter in place of the veal fat.
So, I’m not sure what I made could be classed as jelly, let alone a gelée. It was a sort of slightly chewy, half-frozen plum thing. The instructions said to strain the plum mixture and leave the mushy remains behind but if I’d have done that, I wouldn’t have had much left at all… ohhh, right, yeah tiny restaurant portions. I guess that was my main mistake.
My jelly wobbled a little when… how should I put this, forced to… but overall, yeah, too dense a texture for the brief. My thinly sliced plums on the side looked pretty, though, and while the flavour was quite intense, it wasn’t bad exactly. And I did buy some jelly pots as a back-up. Which is good because this one will mostly be going in the food bin, I think. The biggest fail in terms of taste, though not on presentation...
The Frozen Chocolate Banana for Uncle Jimmy
At the end of Season 2 when The Bear opens for friends and family, we get one of my all-time Bear moments: Richie presenting Uncle Jimmy, who stumped up half a million dollars to help the restaurant get off the ground, with a frozen chocolate banana, wrapped in plastic and finished with a bow. It’s a sweet callback to the most stressful TV episode of all time, S2 ep 7 ‘Fishes’, set years earlier, when a younger Jimmy mentions to a younger Richie at the Berzatto’s house how his dad used to take him to a chocolate-covered frozen banana stand when he was a kid.
There’s no getting round this: my two attempts both kinda looked like poop-on-sticks. The first try, with melted dark chocolate chips, an improvised metal skewer and a not-quite-frozen-enough banana, was a total clusterfuck. Choc dripping everywhere, the banana almost splitting in two over the bowl as I dipped and dripped.
Before the second go, I went out, bought and ate a Twister for the lolly stick, made sure the banana was 100% frozen enough, bought some more chocolate (Dairy Milk) and it was... pretty similar to the first attempt, if maybe a teensy bit neater. The chocolate just sets so, so quickly, another near-impossible art for me to practice. I think perhaps having a lot more chocolate might help too. We did find a bow for it. So there’s that.
There are a few of these moments throughout the show where the staff get to serve their family and friends: Carmy pouring broth over frozen grapes for Claire or Sydney explaining to two diners that the Coca-Cola ribs were something her mum used to make. Or Marcus’ final touch: cutting the candle on the table in half as it’s hiding the caramel sauce for his banana ice-cream sundae (with brioche crumbs!) But Jimmy’s reaction to the chocolate banana is my favourite and sums up The Bear in one simple scene: everyone’s allowed to get emotional about all kinds of family when they step into this restaurant, even curmudgeonly old uncs.
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