“You need love,” Anthony Bourdain says about cooking in his Les Halles Cookbook. “Hopefully it’s love for the people you’re cooking for … but love for what you’re doing, and for the ingredients you are doing it with, will more than suffice.”
Bourdain’s words ring true in FX’s award-winning comedy-drama The Bear, which recently broke the record for most Emmy nominations for a comedy series at an astounding 23. Across three seasons so far, The Bear has excelled at explorations of not only the need for love to drive the act of cooking, but also how love makes itself known through such an act.
Though the 23 Emmy nominations are for the show’s second season, the third and most recent addition has taken The Bear to another level of storytelling while remaining true to the connection between love and cooking.
After transforming the family place his older brother left to him from a run-down sandwich shop into an elegant restaurant in search of a Michelin star, Carmen Berzatto finds himself at odds with his passion for cooking. Where there was once love and inspiration, there seems now to be only anxiety and waste.
Despite Carmy’s difficulties, cooking’s connection to love is still clear in every character — from beloved and snarky Chef Tina Marrero (Liza Colón-Zayas) to joker-turned-purpose-driven Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bacrach). Love, I’m convinced, is the root of this show’s thesis.
So, too, is what happens when that very same love for others and for ourselves is neglected.
With the anxious spiral Carmy devolves into throughout season 3, this neglect is never more obvious. And if we take a closer look at Carmy’s relationship with cooking, we find a complicated past that very much influences his present.
Seven Fishes
Before we can understand Carmy, though, we have to understand his mother.
We first meet the Berzatto matriarch, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis), in season 2 episode 6. Arguably the most anxiety-ridden episode of the series, “Fishes” shows the love and trauma that filled and continues to fill the house in which Carmy grew up.
Throughout the episode, Donna frantically prepares Seven Fishes, an Italian-American meal served during the Christmas holidays, for her family. The kitchen is a chaotic mess and Donna is in drunken hysterics, begging her children to help her and then snapping at them when they try. Between timers buzzing and glasses shattering, Donna tells anyone who will listen, but especially her youngest child Carmy, that no one appreciates her efforts. No one, she suggests firmly as she slaps Carmy’s cheek before shoving him away, appreciates what she is trying to say with her food. Despite her claims otherwise, it’s difficult to know whether Donna actually does care for her children. Or whether she cares more about what her children, by no fault of their own, have done to her.
Time Well Spent
This difficulty lessens somewhat when we see Donna again, about five years later at the opening of her children’s restaurant, The Bear. Though she doesn’t step foot into the establishment on its ‘Friends and Family’ night, she does speak with her son-in-law, Pete (Chris Witaske). Through tears, Donna tells him that she’s proud of Carmy and her daughter Natalie (Abby Elliott), that she loves them “so much.” She just doesn’t know how to tell them.
This rare moment of sincerity from Donna puts her actions and words during “Fishes” in a slightly different light. She might not know how to tell her children she loves them, but she does try to show them. The hours she spent on Seven Fishes was once part of that effort. Chef Andrea Terry (Olivia Colman), owner and executive chef of Michelin star restaurant Ever, somewhat echoes this sentiment in season 2 episode 7, “Forks.” Cooking for people, she tells Richie, is “time well spent.”
But Donna, who has let her own trauma and issues taint this act of love, sees it only as time not recognized.
Amusement and Enjoyment
Donna’s character offers a broader perspective as to why Carmy might have a somewhat unstable relationship with cooking. Though he also suffered under the verbal abuse of Empire’s Chef David Fields (Joel McHale), we know that Carmy’s intensity and anger regarding cooking began years earlier. In fact, his entire career essentially stemmed from a desire to prove his now-dead brother Michael (Jon Bernthal) wrong.
“Because we had this connection through food and [Michael] had made me feel so rejected … I made this plan where I was going to work in all the best restaurants in the world,” Carmy explains the first time he shares his story with an Al-Anon group in the season 1 finale. “I just wanted him to be like, ‘Good job.’ And the more he wouldn’t respond, and the more our relationship kind of strained, the deeper into this I went and the better I got.”
Carmy, it seems, has a tendency to throw himself into cooking for similar reasons as Donna — to show how much he cares, yes, but also to prove how worthy he is of other people’s care. If he can cook well enough, if he can be the best, then he can give the people he cares about what they need. And if he destroys himself in the process, then that only proves how much he loves them. Then, at least, he wouldn’t feel like he failed them.
Neither Amusement Nor Enjoyment
“I don’t need to provide amusement or enjoyment. I don’t need to receive amusement or enjoyment,” Carmy says after spending most of The Bear’s debut night locked in the walk-in fridge. “Because no amount of good is worth how terrible this [failing others] feels.”
By season 3, Carmy has fully convinced himself of this reality. Like Donna, he has forgotten that the love he shows through cooking doesn’t mean much if he doesn’t also let back in the people he keeps pushing away.
Carmy distancing himself from his loved ones — refusing to make up with Richie, not confiding in Natalie, avoiding collaboration with his business partner and chef de cuisine Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) — is his own version of Donna refusing help with Seven Fishes. He thinks he’s doing them a favor, that they’ll still know this is love. He doesn’t realize that his self-imposed distance has made his love all the more difficult to translate.
But that doesn’t mean Carmy’s ability to show his love through cooking is completely indecipherable.
Communicating Through Creativity
One of the most important things we’ve learned about Carmy so far is that he pays attention. Consciously and subconsciously, Carmy takes what he views around him and channels the feelings he receives from them into his dishes.
“I felt like I could speak through the food,” Carmy admits at an Al-Anon meeting. “Like I could communicate through creativity.”
Cooking is Carmy’s language when words fail him. And this is never clearer than through his drawings.
Season 3 episode 1, “Tomorrow,” shows us Carmy across the years, filling journals with beautiful drawings of ingredients he’s worked with and meals he’s imagined. Through this act, we see him patient and calm. We also see those same drawings brought to life in the dishes he tests for The Bear’s new daily menus. When he’s searching for inspiration, Carmy looks back to the moments and the people that helped shape him.
The time he puts into these drawings is, for Carmy, time well spent.
This makes the scene in season 3 episode 9, “Apologies,” of Carmy trying and failing to sketch a proper dish so significant. He creates out of inspiration from the things he loves. If he can’t bring himself to sketch, neither can he truly create. And if he can’t create from inspiration and love, what choice does Carmy have but to fall back into the only other way he knows how to show love: impossible expectations and anxiety-induced perfectionism.
Open to Inspiration
Carmy’s refusal to nurture the connections in his life affects not his mental wellbeing, but his creativity, too.
In season 2 episode 4, “Honeydew,” we’re asked to listen along with The Bear’s pastry chef Marcus Brooks (Lionel Boyce) as Chef Luca (Will Poulter) explains his understanding of cooking and what makes food ‘good.’
“Most of the incredible things I’ve eaten haven’t been because the skill level is exceptionally high or there’s loads of mad fancy techniques,” Luca says after admitting he’s accepted he’ll never be the best. “It’s because it’s been really inspired.”
“At a certain stage,” Luca continues, “it becomes less about skill and it’s more about being open … to the world, to yourself, to other people.”
Obviously Carmy has the skill he needs to help make The Bear an incredible, memorable thing. And he knows it.
What he doesn’t have is the same openness and wonder he once found in the greenhouses of The French Laundry or the calm kitchen at Ever. He’s forgotten the beauty and innovation that can come from something as simple as collaborating with Sydney in the small kitchen of his apartment.
In the absence of connection, Carmy relies on perfection. And, like the Donna we first meet in “Fishes,” he doesn’t seem to realize what he’s losing in the process.
Taking Care of People
“You must like cooking for other people,” Bourdain concludes in the Les Halles Cookbook. “You must enjoy the fact you are nourishing them, pleasing them, giving them the best you’ve got.”
Though I agree with Bourdain, I’d add a bit more to this, from the wise words of one Natalie Berzatto: “Chefs always say a big part of the job is taking care of people, right? You can’t really do that if you’re not taking care of yourself.”
Carmy is an extremely complex character. Despite his efforts to be better, his past traumas influence his life and his actions in harmful ways toward both himself and his loved ones. But Carmy’s never, not even in the depths of his despair in season 3, stopped trying. At least not for the sake of others.
Whether it’s the love he carries for his siblings or the love he holds for his found family at The Bear, Carmy cares deeply. It is, at the end of the day, what drives both his personal and professional lives. Even if he isn’t so great at pointing that care back at himself.
And so, though The Bear might not be a traditional love story, it is very much a story about love. About what happens when we accept it, but also what happens if we forget to nourish it. If we push it too far away.
If we, like Carmy, forget that to give love is also to allow ourselves to receive it.
See how The Bear fares at this year’s Emmys on Sunday, September 15th 2024 at 8pm EDT / 5pm PDT on ABC.
