This article contains spoilers for The Bear.
Last month, my wife took an international trip and I had the house to myself for two weeks. I planned to use that time as a writing intensive to get some work done on a script I had been prepping. Right before she left, I finished the first season of The Bear, FX’s hit show about the chefs inside a Chicago sandwich shop. As my creative retreat got underway, I started season two. It turned out to be the perfect fuel.
In The Bear’s first season, Carmen Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), a top chef at one of the best restaurants in New York City, returns to his neighborhood in Chicago to take over his late older brother’s restaurant. That season focuses on Carmen’s work to get The Original Beef of Chicagoland running like a Michelin-starred restaurant, his second-in-command Sidney (Ayo Edebiri) the skilled chef who shares his vision, and the initial resistance he meets from the staff, especially his “cousin” Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach).
As season two begins, Carmen has found money that his brother left hidden for him after his suicide and is transforming The Original Beef into The Bear, the restaurant he always wanted to open with his brother. As The Original Beef closes and The Bear preps for its grand opening, Carmen sends various members of the staff to train at other restaurants and up their game.
The season is focused on getting better, and as I worked my way through a big, new project, that energy was infectious. The Bear’s baker Marcus (Lionel Boyce) heads to Copenhagen to train under an expert dessert maker played by Will Poulter. Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas ) and Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson) take classes at a culinary school in Chicago. And, in one of the standout episodes of the season, “Forks,” Carmen sends Richie to work for a week in a lightly fictionalized version of real Chicago eatery, Ever, dubbed “the world’s greatest restaurant” in the show.
Everyone working at Ever has a commitment to excellence. For Richie’s first few days there, he’s only permitted to wash forks (hence the episode’s title). He doesn’t buy into the restaurant’s high stakes approach at first. Having worked in a restaurant for years, the extra care that Ever takes doesn't seem necessary to him.
Eventually, though, he gets it. A crucial moment involves a member of the staff overhearing one table say that they regret not being able to try Chicago-style deep dish pizza before the end of their trip. Richie is sent to Pequod’s Pizza to pick up a pie, and rushes back to the restaurant with it. He assumes that just serving the pizza will be enough, but a chef gives it the Ever spin, cutting it into smaller bite-sized pies and plating them with fine dining flair. Richie asks if he can take the dish out, and when he serves it, we see him come alive doing what he does best — making a connection with customers. When he goes back to The Bear, he’s changed. Literally — he trades his greasy old t-shirts in for a smart suit. Something clicked at Ever, and he realizes that he has skills he hadn’t, until now, fully understood or exercised in his work.
So much of The Bear’s second season is about people working as hard as they can to get better at what they do. Carmen has a monomaniacal focus on his work that he tries to undo throughout season two, but other characters have a healthier approach to self-improvement. Marcus works through a huge pile of cookbooks as he tries to level up as a baker. Sidney goes all around Chicago, trying the best food in the city to inspire her as she and Carmen create the menu for the new restaurant. Tina is older than most of the other workers at The Original Beef and, like Richie, seeing excellence up close motivates her to make something more out of the back half of her life.
When you’re trying to get a creative project off the ground (and when malaise or laziness or boredom can easily set in) seeing other people working to realize their dreams can be majorly inspiring. Throughout the season, Sidney is reading Leading with the Heart: Coach K's Successful Strategies for Basketball, Business, and Life, and though basketball is a different discipline than fine dining, she takes key lessons from it that help her lead The Bear to its big reopening. In the same way, though I don't work in food, The Bear's focus on nurturing creativity and helping people hone their skills gave me the spark I needed to go write a bunch of pages.
I'm writing a feature film script, not making food. But like Marcus, I can practice and practice. Like Sidney, I can look to other good work for inspiration. Like Tina and Richie, I can be motivated to excellence by working alongside skilled people. Our dreams are different, but the strategies are the same.