Anyone watching this show? Jeremy Allen White plays a chef who moves back to Chicago to run his brother’s restaurant after his brother commits suicide. It’s a failing restaurant, they have no money, and his brother owed $300,000 to their uncle. It’s very Chicago, my friends and my wife who have all worked at restaurants really identify with it, and it really shows the inner workings of a struggling dive.
I’m not sure what to say about the ending though. I don’t want to mention it in the OP and spoil the spoiler.
Binged it, loved it, hope it gets a second season. Also want to eat there. The penultimate episode was one of the most nervewracking things I’ve watched in a long while–just pure tension and conflict, had my stomach in knots.
I read an article suggesting watching the last episode first, then circling back around to the beginning. Knowing how it ends makes the whole thing into a kind of comedy of errors and defuses a lot of the tension.
It seems like a really solid suggestion, and I wish I could erase my memory and give it a try.
In any case, really enjoyed the show. I thought it was a little heavy-handed in places, but overall very very good.
I thought about that as well. It’s filmed at and based on Mr. Beef at 666 N. Orleans.
The thing I couldn’t quite put together was finding the cash in the tomato cans at the end of the final ep. It was a neat discovery but how did Mikey get them in there? So all that money is there now but they still have to pay off Cicero.
The hint was in the books–300K paid out to KBL Electric. The label on the tomatoes is KBL and it’s actually pretty simple to can things yourself, you can buy canning rigs so simplicity itself to make big batches of tomatoes and can them up with the cash included. So Mikey diverted huge chunks into cash, stashed it in the tomatoes while at the same time borrowing more from Cicero. Which is probably gonna come bite everyone in the ass but that’s for next season I suppose.
God, I wish there were more shows like this. I absolutely adored it. I finished the final two episodes last night. I’m a fan of shows that can create intense drama and a sense of high stakes, without relying on the plot devices of crime, physical violence, zombies or some other kind of dangerous monster, or supernatural elements. (For this reason I loved Mad Men and Succession.) The characters on The Bear are brilliantly acted and the cinematography and camera work is first rate, and I think the show is a spiritual successor/adaptation of Anthony Bourdain’s The Kitchen Confidential. (I’m talking about the book - I know there was a screen adaptation of it years ago but I never watched it because I did not hear good things about it.)
The environment of a restaurant kitchen is really similar to construction work, the ball-busting banter is exactly the same, although I think the pressure in a kitchen is significantly higher. Actually, kitchen work basically IS construction work if you think about it, you’re just constructing a temporary product out of consumable materials rather than a permanent structure. In my experience, construction workers and restaurant cooks are typically drawn from the same exact pool of people, and many industry lifers have rotated between the two.
Does the series maintain the same frenetic, editing style as the first episode? I started watching it, but the format of the quick edits and camera movement was more chaotic than I like and I gave up.
I loved it! Yes, @filmore , it maintains a pretty frenetic style. For me, it felt fresh to watch a show about a kitchen that isn’t at all a show about food, but about the chaos of the kitchen.
An interesting note: the penultimate episode was a “shot all in one take” episode.
. . . felt a little too rough and incoherent. Like, ok, Mikey was stashing $300k in cash for Carmey to find. Mikey also left his brother a restaurant with $300k in debt. So, the whole cash-strapped premise was artificially created by the dead brother, who could have paid off the debt, but instead left the cash for Carmey so he could pay back the debt after 8 episodes of good TV?
It just wasn’t funny enough of a show for what was a goofball resolution to land well.
I agree that the ending was weird. For example, where did the $300,000 come from? Was the dead brother just putting aside all the money he was borrowing from the uncle? Was that money from drug deals?
My impression was that he’d been using the loaned money to do something very profitable and extremely shady, but that the only liability following him after the suicide would be the original loans. He figured the money would be found immediately, as soon as they did the very first family meal, and that all would be well.
In the books deposits to KBL were about what he had borrowed from Cicero. Meanwhile he hadn’t paid vendors or taxes, both of which are stil owed. IRS with interest and penalties. They started of the season in critical financial shape before the drops of the money owed to Cicero and that taxes had never been paid. At best this gets them back to that point. No better.
The ending is a big huh? to me.
Meanwhile it’s not being a little bitch to be angry that you are not making the cakes that you are hired to have ready by open, or that you effed up the opening of take out by screwing up the options on the program and vastly underestimating the demand.
Actually, I wondered about the one employee who was learning how to make fancy cakes. I can’t imagine that the kind of people who go to a sandwich shop like that are looking for fancy cakes, or even just slices of fancy cakes.
Basically, Carmy’s fine dining background seemed wrong for the kind of downmarket joint that the sandwich shop was.
(And one question; at one point the guy who was experimenting with baking fancy cakes showed a cookbook to Carmy, to show him what he was trying to achieve. Was that supposed to be Carmy’s cookbook, or one by another celebrity chef?)
I had the same comments about the ending over in the “Series” thread. It seemed too facile and was completely unexplained. After all the excellent writing, direction and acting, it was poorly done.