This post contains spoilers for Season 3 of The Bear.
If you have seen the third season of The Bear, creator Christopher Storer’s dramedy about the revitalization of a struggling Chicago restaurant, you have seen many, many chefs. In the finale alone, there are at least 10 different chef cameos, including appearances from dining world titans René Redzepi and Thomas Keller. At first, those appearances make total sense — real-life chefs on a show about a chef aspiring to join their ranks — but when you consider how The Bear attempts to confront the toxicity of restaurant culture, those cameos become a lot more confusing — and nefarious.
Starting in Episode 1 of Season 3, we see chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto in the famed French Laundry’s chef whites, foraging around for wild plants in Copenhagen alongside Noma staffers, and getting cooking lessons from Daniel Boulud. We also see him in stressful moments with the abusive (and fictional) chef David (Joel McHale), whose cruel words have a profound effect on Carmy’s self-confidence. The intent of these scenes is two-fold: to establish Carmy’s emotional backstory, and also to clarify his culinary bonafides. Because we associate the French Laundry and Boulud’s restaurant Daniel with excellence, it is easy to understand how those experiences have resulted in both incredible culinary skill and (in the case of his experiences with chef David) a lot of trauma.
The Bear takes the latter as a given — that anyone working in the high-pressure world of fine-dining is going to have some damage — while also absolving some of the key players in that reality. Keller, who tenderly teaches Carmy how to truss a chicken, has been accused in real life of overseeing an intense, “heartless” culture at his New York restaurant Per Se. In his 2019 memoir, chef Kwame Onwuachi detailed how he regularly experienced rage and thinly veiled racism from his co-workers in that kitchen: “The anger was like black mold in the air ducts, infecting everything,” he wrote. “As I’ve opened my own kitchens, at times I’ve certainly been guilty of regurgitating the habits I learned at Per Se. But when I grow enraged, I also try to remember how it made me feel to be yelled at on the line.”
Keller never publicly responded to Onwuachi’s allegations of workplace misconduct — he has, though, apologized for disappointing a critic who had a bad meal at Per Se — and The Bear demonstrates his fictional relationship with Carmy as warm and instructive. Whether the series is engaging in a bit of revisionist history or not, it does paint the employer-employee relationship in a warm light that would feel unfamiliar to many who have worked in Keller’s restaurants: in 2023, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed suit against the Las Vegas location of his famed restaurant Bouchon, alleging that managers there engaged in extensive sexual harassment and retaliation against those who reported it.
For his part, Redzepi has also openly admitted to engaging in physical and verbal abuse as the executive chef of Noma, which was long considered among the world’s elite restaurants. In a 2015 essay for Lucky Peach, he detailed his “absolute rage” when cooks at Noma would screw up even the most minor tasks, a product of his own experiences of learning from abusive chefs. “I’ve been a bully for a large part of my career,” Redzepi wrote. “I’ve yelled and pushed people. I’ve been a terrible boss at times.” In the essay, he talks about finally realizing the impact of his behavior on his staff, and the “slow evolution” of building a respectful restaurant culture. But it’s unclear exactly how Redzepi actually improved the culture at Noma, or when exactly he stopped shoving and screaming at people. In 2022, the chef said that he had undergone “many, many hours of therapy” to address this behavior, but has said nothing about how he might repair the damage he’s wrought with the people who bore the brunt of his abuse.
Redzepi and Keller are both architects of a modern fine dining industry built around unpaid and poorly paid labor, and we have seen workplace misconduct reported at places like Vespertine, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and the Willows Inn, all restaurants as committed to excellence above all else, like Noma and the French Laundry. So why does The Bear rely on them for its credibility?
In The Bear, the fictional chef David is essentially cast as the source of all of Carmy’s restaurant traumas. Like Carmy, the series blames him, not the systemic toxicity in the restaurant industry. It never reckons with the reality that the abuses in the industry were never limited to just one or two bad apples. In fact, it places chefs like Keller and Redzepi in stark contrast to David, portraying them both on-screen as gentle, encouraging mentors. (Of course, if it had been more pointed in examining that behavior, it probably wouldn’t have been able to convince so many of those famous chefs to show up on screen.)
Also telling is how Carmy’s relationship with the fictional chef Andrea Terry (Olivia Colman) plays out. Terry is a sort of surrogate mother to Carmy, even though she’s still explicitly committed to that same pursuit of excellence at all costs. On some level, the show lets her off the hook for her role in the industry and its abuses, simply because Carmy doesn’t view her as the root of all his problems. If the writing were more intentional here, it could have examined the ways that kitchen dynamics function almost entirely on a razor’s edge, the inherent struggle between pushing someone to grow in a high-stress situation and doing so respectfully. Instead, The Bear simply accepts that some amount of abuse must be inherent to restaurant work.
As I wrote previously, The Bear struggles this season under the weight of its many, many chef cameos. There are so many scenes in which we see Carmy under the tutelage of folks like Keller and Daniel Boulud that totally distract from the core of the series: the complicated Berzatto family dynamic. But more than that, it struggles to make its point about the abuses and toxicity of the restaurant industry because it is willing to absolve the real-life chefs who have actually engaged in that kind of demeaning behavior.
