The Bear Is A Show About Labor, Just As Much As It’s About Food

Amidst the kitchen chaos, some insights into building multi-generational workplace

“Who's cooking your food anyway?” — Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly 

Author’s Note: This essay contains spoilers for The Bear season 1 and 2.

I had put off watching The Bear for a while. Caught up in the turbulence of freelance deadlines, academic deadlines, job hunting, interviewing, and picking up side gigs, I wasn’t in the right headspace to subject myself to the show’s cacophony of culinary hypertension (a painfully thrilling cocktail of panic attacks, shouting matches, and that pit-in-your-stomach feeling that something’s going to boil over at any second).

The initial buzz about the show centered around its realistic portrayal of restaurants ranging from elite fine dining to local dives. Ahead of the WGA strike, the show made headlines again—this time because one of its writers, Alex O’Keefe, spoke openly about how he attended an awards show with a bank balance in the negatives and even wrote an episode from his local library in the winter after he lost heat and power in his Brooklyn apartment and the studio refused to fly him to LA to join the rest of the writers room. My interest was piqued, especially as I found myself trying to manage my own professional precarity. 

This isn’t going to be a review of The Bear so much as a reflection on what it’s been like to watch the workplace drama during a time that’s been dubbed “Hot Strike Summer.” While the show’s release predated most of the labor actions we see now, food service has long been a hotbed for so many entangled, intersecting labor struggles. Kitchens are places where workers from all kinds of different backgrounds, ages, and skill levels toil together in close, stressful quarters. It’s a profession that (like so many other industries) has been plagued with systemic issues of abuse, low wages, harassment, instability, and discrimination. But it’s also a labor of love and financial necessity for many. Given the show’s commitment to accuracy, I was curious how the show would portray these tensions between authority, passion, hierarchy, and exploitation. Among mouthwatering food shots and ear-splitting screaming matches, a surprisingly nuanced look at one restaurant’s multi-generational workplace emerged.