hourglassfish

[hourglassfish]

what's a girl gotta do to get her short ribs on the menu?

[hourglassfish]

Risottogate Extras

Thanks so much for taaags @eatandsleepwell when I read them I was like 😭 because there was stuff in there that I took out when I edited it down. So some replies which I hope is OK? I love all the different readings of this show and talking and thinking about it, and my mum doesn't like 'that shouting programme'.

I agree with you that it's implied that Carmy is the chef from the veal fat story. You can sort of see it when he’s like ‘one day he just hit it’, in his face*. The reason I feel like Sydney worked it out is because we see her frown, as though she is thinking while Carmy explains the specifications of the gelee, and then she explains how she got there, to both Marcus and Carm, which I feel like she wouldn’t do if she knew it as a lesson from him. I mean this could just be her remembering a story she’s heard, and finishing it off to give herself plausible deniability. However, I also think her having that technical knowledge is part of an ongoing rhythm, of her arriving and both Syd and Carmy thinking it will be mentee/mentor, but by the end of Brigade it's very clear that won’t be the dynamic.

I also agree that the decision to switch the kitchen to a brigade comes from Al-Anon. I feel like the decision to hand the labour of doing that to her (right now this minute), is sort of catalysed by her brilliance in that moment: because the previous day, when we cut from Al-Anon to the chaos of her and Richie yelling with Carm in the middle (😭) she feels like part of the problem, not an easy solution. 

how much fun do you think the set dresser had sneaking tomatoes into each and every scene?

I think the reviewer isn’t so harsh on The Beef! He describes it as shabby but also much loved, there is very little slamming. His depiction of it is so much milder than all the things that Carmy says about it throughout the season, though I know it’s different when an outsider says it. That being said, I think if that review had said ‘the sandwiches are the best they’ve ever been’ Carmy’s entire demeanour would have been different, I’m sorry! 😭 One of the things I really enjoy about unlikelyjapan’s recaps of S2 is that they point out when Carmy’s ego is hurt or when he’s feeling a lil emasculated, and while he is different, he is not a stranger to the type of masculinity we see from Richie, Jimmy and Michael.

I think the second season is really good about sort of opening up the city of Chicago as a place for eating and food excellence, but in the first season it’s all very insular and centred around the Beef and family homes as locations. Sydney and Marcus become the stand-ins for Chicago’s food scene as a whole. Cus Sydney left too, right, like CIA is in NYC? I think there’s another reading of the decision to give the risotto to a reviewer which is that it’s Syd pulling back the blinds and sort of dragging The Beef and Carmy into the light - to gos! Reviews! Let’s throw a gauntlet down and let it rip!

But there is also maybe some projection here from me: I left the city I grew up in for 8 years, to go to university then be in a city that was better for my artistic practice (and I was successful and built a company and won awards but it shot my mental health to shit, and destroyed my body too) and then I came home because of a family death at 26 - 

Just gonna stare into the void for a minute, brb

Damn, he's just like me for real

OK, trigger is over!!!

Anyway

😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

When I came back there were obvs people doing what I had been doing, to a high level - and they hadn’t had all this family estrangement that I had. And it was complicated, you know? Not good, or bad, just complicated.

I be projecting on this man for real, much to think about!!!

Anyway!

See… Richie’s bitterness to me isn’t that weird! He says at the top of System that he’s been looking after Donna for the past six months, he was at the funeral when Carmy wasn’t, he’ll have been holding both Michael and the restaurant together while Carmy was away, and he explicitly says it's to the detriment of his own family situation. We see that happen in the show: he finally gets a job from Jimmy that means he can escape the Beef and do right by Eva and Tiff, and it goes to shit cus someone calls Michael when they needed to call Richie. It feels likely that the loss of the job, the divorce and his place at the Beef will have all been tied together, 8n his head at least. Michael’s love pushed Carmy away, but he depended on Richie day in, day out: both Carmy and Richie want what the other had. Richie envies Carmy’s being protected from the worst of Michael’s addiction. Carmy feels that he missed out on Michael’s honesty and intimacy. Richie does not have the biological/blood claim that Nat or Carmy have, but he was by Mikey’s side day to day. He is left with nothing but memories, many of them painful. He can stay close to this family he has built his life around,but only at their discretion. They can dispose of him (drop his ass) at any time, and as Tina brutally points out in Ceres, where is he gonna go? He is deeply fearful of this, understandably. The response, of course, is that no one asked him to stick by Michael’s side, or care for Donna. But love doesn't work like that.

Don't worry babes, when we communize care it won't have to be like this.

I find the feelings underpinning his behaviour deeply human: I find the behaviour itself vile, and I hate how easily Carmy and the script let him off for withholding the letter. It’s a total non-event. It’s one of very few moments in The Bear where even the first time round I was like ‘nah, that’s poor writing’. Carmy has a bigger response to him bitching about Claire!

I love shipping, and am a fan of romance goggles. Especially with this ship, because people are fucking weird about it. For me personally, the idea of a romance between these two… ah I wanna be into it, I do. When I ignore a bunch of things I kind of enjoy it. Almost.

Someone made that supercut of all their scenes together, and when I watched it, at the end I felt so, so sad. Cus I felt like I’d just spent 90 minutes watching some white dude exploit a really talented Black woman over and over again while she got sadder and sadder and then she threw up in an alleyway. Even whilst seeing moments that felt romantic. Obviously a supercut like that is not a fully accurate representation of their relationship or characters. But the feeling of dismay and unease won't shift.

In S2 especially, there are so many moments where she just looks really sad. I don’t think Carmy wants to compete with her, or with anyone, really, and I definitely don’t think she’s competing with him, she’s sincere when she tells Richie she’s got no ulterior motive: she wants to work, to find the work meaningful, get paid and live her life. But I think it’s hard to leave your training behind, and them man are trained to compete, it’s the only way you move up in the kitchen, and my reading of the risotto, and why it takes up so much SPACE, cus it’s bubbling away for 3 episodes, is that Carmy’s ego enters the chat, and is a part of the destruction that unfolds. 

Anyway, I am off to watch some horror films with Black women as protagonists so that the next time I want to represent myself staring into the void in horror I'm not left with Florence and Mia, much as I love them.

*to believe this i have to ignore that he credits the discovery to a sous and we know he was CDC at EMP. But he also talks about cubes on a dish where everything is a circle, so you know, we can suspend disbelief when we want

[hourglassfish]

On Season 1, Episode 7 Part Three : Risottogate

OK look,

Go and get yourself an ecto cooler or something, cus this is long, OK? This is long.

You comfortable?

Alright, let’s go.

don't forget the Xanax!

Elevated Beef (stock)

There’s a connection drawn between Sydney and veal stock in the Bear. She spills it all over herself during Brigade. Claire interrupts Carmy purchasing veal stock for menu testing her bone broth idea at the end of 2:2.  It’s an interesting ingredient to align her with: a staple of French cuisine, something you’ll find in a professional high end kitchen but not necessarily at home, a distinctive, practical component which provides a subtle, solid umami base for a range of dishes.

The first time this connection is drawn is during one of my favourite interactions: the ‘plum haribo’ story in Brigade. Marcus has decorated his work station (I love him), and despite the fact that Carmy says he’s having flashbacks (eeeeeeek), I think he is happy to see this coming together of his two worlds.

They start talking about this fancy plum dish, and a gelee component (which will reappear in Honeydew!) that had to have a very specific texture. Carmy has been talking about the dedication needed to make this dish work with pride, presenting the texture of the gelee as a huge challenge, something it took someone a year to figure out. Sydney cracks it in less than a minute. Veal fat. She knows what’s needed, and she knows why: it congeals when it’s cold. Boom!

Carmy’s response to this always amuses me. He is not…dismayed exactly. Not quite. After all, it’s a reminder of her brilliance, and also that that world is not so far away.  That being said, she cuts across a punchline here; and what was a mystery to the best chefs in the world for a year is immediately obvious to her, to the extent that it’s not even really a flex on her part: she states it quite diffidently. Marcus’s gleeful ‘Mission Accomplished’ is very different from Carmy’s, which is a bit more ‘…oh.’.

On rewatches where I feel charitable, Carmy then implements the brigade cus he's been reminded that he has someone close by from that world, he has an ally that speaks his language, who is talented. On days when I feel less charitable, I combine this with him later talking her through the differences between stock/jus/demi-glace in front of Tina  like an asshole, and see him handing the brigade over at that specific moment, in the specific way that he does as passive aggressive. Most days I’m with the former! Still…we’re back in the grey areas of Syd and Carmy’s  dynamic. Where all the good shit is!

He's so glad she figured that out so quickly, absolutely not feeling a type of way about it, nope, not at all

I wanted to start with this story cus it opens up three things for me:

a) just a frisson, a hint, a delicious drop (!) of competition between Syd and Carmy 

b) the question, beloved by fanfic writers everywhere, of what the dynamic between these two might have been if they had met in a different context.

c) a third, messier thing, about Carmy going away, tooling up, coming back and it needing to be worth something, that going way. As far as he knows at this point, It didn’t achieve what it was meant to achieve, it didn’t get Mikey’s attention. Maybe he didn’t need to leave Chicago to do it. Sydney's talent tickles that tension, as does Marcus's (trios, trios!). So what was it for? What were the past few years of his life for, if a bunch of this stuff was in Chicago all along?

Who was Carmy away from Chicago? Who is he without his family? We’ve only seen one flashback so far, very much from inside Carmy’s head. The way he tells it is very different from what we see. At Al Anon, he describes himself like this:

‘when somebody new came into the restaurant to stage, I’d look at them like they were competition, like I’m gonna smoke this motherfucker’.

But you're tall and sexy, so don't worry about it babes

Gosh. Yes Chef!

I don’t think Carmy holds anything like this level of aggression towards any of the original staff of the Beef: it would be absurd: they don’t have his training or experience. For the most part we see doing the work of pulling a team together, which explicitly involves putting that kind of competitiveness to the side.

I don’t think he has this energy for Sydney.

Not quite.

I do think it’s an important thing for us to learn about his character. I do think that we are told it at the beginning of Episode 8, after Sydney has quit, because there are ugly feelings around the risotto dish. I do think that those feelings drive a lot of how Review goes down, and that Carmy knows this.  

This ferocious comparison and competition, used as a driving force, is a part of who Carmy is, and a part of the kitchens that he has come from. In another context, Sydney would have just been competition. And he’d have been trying to smoke her.

Let’s follow a humble bowl of risotto through THREE EPISODES, and about 5000 words, good GOD.

Tracing the Journey of the Risotto: Unanticipated

I tried to find appetising pics of her cooking the risotto but mostly it doesn't look very aesthetic, so here is Syd in my fave of her scarves.

A Risotto, playing on ‘tongue in cheek’ is first tentatively pitched in Sheridan, as an idea for a new menu that they have ‘spoken about’. Carmy is… noncommittal. He’s not into it, but he doesn’t say that, he just doesn’t really engage. I think there are a bunch of valid reasons to not be into it, tbh. I’ve ordered risotto to go. It’s always kind of gluey and disappointing. Sydney isn’t given a clear no, so she decides to cook it: it becomes something she has to convince him on.

He doesn’t get to try it in this episode as there are drugs to sell and about a million different fires to fight. We know that she dreams about this dish though. In this episode she talks about how thinking about her mistakes with Sheridan Road keep her up at night,  but the last images of the episode are of her dreaming: beef… raspberries… cola��� fire: there it is. Cola braised short rib. We’re back in the realm of deeply personal creative expression that I spoke about in part two. That anxious energy around failing with Sheridan Road? Is going somewhere else, is being transformed. This is important, and has the potential to be profoundly healing. This dish has meaning for her.

The dish returns in Ceres. Syd is an unstoppable force with the dish, and having said she wants to be listened to, is not listening to several requests from Carmy for more time. Stressful! He deals with it well, at first. He is calm, and polite and asks her to hold on. Which is not a no. But then -

 ‘I know everybody you used to work for, I called them before hiring you’

oooooh weeee.

There is nothing wrong with him seeking out references. His reasons are logical, and he’s transparent about them. Personally? I think it’s sensible to let employees know you’re seeking out references to avoid paranoia, but it’s not a legal requirement. People do it informally via whisper networks all the time, both purposefully and by accident. Gotta say though, the phrasing and the timing of this ‘reveal’ made me wince.

There are a million different theories of feedback, of how to give and receive it well. One argues that feedback must be asked for, accurate and measurable. If it’s not measurable, then you are nitpicking. If it’s not accurate, you’re hating. If it’s not asked for, or at least delivered in an environment where it’s anticipated, it is unlikely to be received well. Carmy, unfortunately, delivers a whopper of unanticipated feedback here: ‘me and all your old bosses (I know EVERYONE YOU USED TO WORK WITH)have been talking about you and they all agree on this flaw’.

YIKES

Would I let Syd stab me for a bowl of this? Maaaaybe. Maybe.

My reading is that he wanted to ask for her patience, and to say that his decision to pace out the changes is coming from experience, but he’s being backed into a corner, so he summons up the spectre of her old bosses for back up. Syd had opened up last episode, and is still very vulnerable about Sheridan, so he unintentionally wounds her here. We can read this in her response. He says her employers said she was smart, talented,  green and impatient, she hears ‘me and everyone you’ve worked for think your business failed because you were green and impatient, that’s why you’re here, and why this dish can’t go on the menu’. This dish is getting entangled in so many other things about where they’ve come from.

He does take the time to reframe it: outlines his practical concerns, and starts to articulate that he wants to maintain calm before they make more changes - 

And then Sugar is banging on the door, demonstrating his point.

At this point, Carmy is trying to build a parachute. They don’t have one when Jimmy comes to visit in Hands, but they do have one that becomes Richie’s bail by Braciole. Reserve building takes steady, dull consistency, but this isn’t communicated, and they don’t agree on a timeframe for the menu development, or even to come back to this conversation. This is small stuff, I know I sound nitpicky! But in my experience managing people, tension builds in the unknowns, in the places where there aren’t specifics, especially when you have a team member like Sydney who is ambitious and dynamic.

Sydney is firmly in the realm of the job that Carmy specified here. He is dialling business, she is doing everything else. If you’re a nerd and you zoom in on her CV, she has done menu development before. She is green, but not that green. She is impatient, but she also doesn’t have the same complicated relationship with change at the Beef that pretty much everyone else but Marcus does. The risotto is the first unofficial test of the impact of strain on their (messy ass) working dynamic, to Review’s much more official gauntlet.

Why would they write a proper CV and film it if they didn't want me to spend 5 minutes hitting pause repeatedly until I'd read it?

*squints* designed daily specials with complete creative control! At Alinea! A THREE STAR MICHELIN RESTAURANT! At the time they wrote this, it had held and retained those stars for twelve years! She is not new to this!

Tracing the Journey of the Risotto Two: Unmeasurable

They try again with the risotto later. She is a little more patient, initially. She makes the effort and he thanks her for it. He tries it, which she really wanted (surely that will convince him!), and she has modified her request, from to-gos, to trying it as a special. Her equivalent of baby steps. She listened. She’s trying. Lovely Angel and my main man Ebra come by, taste and support Carmy’s ‘tremendous’.

But here Carmy gives feedback that isn’t measurable. It’s not perfect, but he doesn’t say why, even though he knows, and it’s an easy fix! He’s nitpicking, because he doesn’t, for a bunch of practical reasons, want to put risotto on the menu, but doesn’t want to shoot her down. He asks her if she understands after she has explicitly said that she doesn’t (cus he’s not being up front), and then doesn‘t explain himself. He’s not really asking if she understands, he’s telling her to stop. It’s not really the dish that’s not ready, not really, it’s him, he’s not ready to make a new raft of changes, to think through the gap between the Michelin star excellence he has come from, and the budgetary, practical restrains of where he’s at.

I think this is really fair. Or at least understandable. Carmy just wants to catch a breath, and he has to have oversight on so many different things at once, adding something else to that must feel terrifying. But the way he communicates this shuts down and restricts: he switches the dynamic from one where they listen to each other (which requires that they both explain themselves) to one where he tells and she does. It doesn’t really give her anywhere to go, so her frustration is inevitable and also understandable. Measurable feedback! Clarity. If you don’t want risotto on the menu Carmy, rip the band-aid, and say it, and say why. Get her to work on something that is going to fit with the menu in a different way, in the way that you want, and be clear about the way in which you want to shape it!

He knows he’s not been great here. Carmy apologises for ‘being shitty’ later in the episode (as others have noted, it’s a shit apology) and he also starts his apology with ‘needs acid’ in 1:8. He knows that a lot of Review is to do with this dish.

When Carmy apologises about being shitty later in Ceres, she doesn’t mention that she put the dish out earlier. It’s framed as a little moment of.. if not revenge, then a little something for herself. I think she knows it’s not OK, not really, or she’d have mentioned it, and her face says a lot when she says it’s cool.  I’m not a chef, I only ever worked FOH, but my instinct is that its dodgy and it fills me with unease. A grey area. A pop of tension.

Tracing the Journey of the Risotto Three: Hating

Whenever I think about the strikes, I think about the broader ensemble in this show.

The next time the risotto turns up, it’s being mentioned in a review. A lot happens here, so I’m gonna bullet point out all the references, then analyse some of them afterwards. I’m also gonna jump a whole bunch, cus I want to stay tightly focused on the risotto itself, and the dynamic between Syd and Carmy as relates to it:

Ebra reads the review out!

Syd has a lovely, gentle smile for Ebra as he reads it, her whole body relaxes as she taps at the tablet. This validation clearly means a lot to her. Ebra’s dynamic with both Sydney and Marcus is consistently a joy to behold. When he tells her in Dogs that she’s given Marcus a lot of confidence, she glows, and I think it’s something she really needed to hear. He’s subtle about it, but he never makes her life difficult when she implements the brigade. There’s something about the oldest member of the team, reading the review out, a little haltingly cus English isn’t his first language, that doubles down on the love that can be present in the Beef, making it all the more jarring when –

Carmy cuts across this and starts talking about the day’s opening with a ‘stop reading that shit’

Fam ‘that shit’ just described your food as elevated and elegant! In the foodie heaven that is Chicago! In your restaurant which is kind of failing! It’s your team’s first review since you’ve been there! So straight away you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, because what has got his knickers in a twist?

Carmy is justified in being pissed off about Syd’s actions here. What he is not justified in, is not finding a way to celebrate the review itself with his team, who deserve to have this moment. It’s a milestone for them to get some external validation, and the restaurant, quite frankly, needs it. A five star review! Tina squeals with delight when she hears it. Before a new program and a busy shift is the perfect moment to read this out, and go into the work feeling good. A united, gassed up team? Would have killed those to gos.

Sydney is also responsible for this messiness though. In going rogue the episode before, something which could have been about the team becomes about her in a way that is sticky, and it becomes harder to celebrate. It was not her intention, but this is the outcome.

Ebra ignores Carmy

(cus he’s redundant and white JK JK don’t cancel me)

There is a double edged shout out to the team

‘the staff moves are next level’: this is such brilliant, important feedback from a team that has had to weather so much change! Also calls back to Richie:  ‘Uh oh, Sydney making moves!’ in the car in Hands.

‘The sandwiches are so delicious as ever, but the standout dish that... that, that encapsulates all, this was the risotto with braised beef. The rice was luscious with a surprising ribbon of brine running through the sauce. The chef obviously knew what she was doing’

THAT REVIEWER IS A SNITCH

Did Syd know that reviewer was a reviewer? I dunno man. Maybe! She’s Chicago born and bred, knows the food scene well. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility that she’d recognise him. Maybe she just wanted some good immediate feedback, while she was feeling shitty! Maybe all she wanted was him to send a message back to the kitchen that’s like tell Syd the risotto was great: the impact of his Review but on a much smaller, less disruptive scale.

I think it’s genuine coincidence, which unfortunately looks… not like that. The thing is: the reviewer being a reviewer isn’t what the issue is. The issue is giving food not signed off by her boss to a customer.  She'd have never gotten away with that at the places where she was before. Putting the dish out is going rogue, regardless of who she gives it to. It’s not a team move. If Carmy called in her old bosses for back up, she calls in his potential new customers. Eek. EEK.

Sydney desperately tries to get Ebra to shush, to no avail

(extremely funny work from Ayo, but also he’s pissed, and she either already knows it, or already antipates it – it’s hard to get a read on how long they’ve been in and when they learnt about the review)

‘river of brine, huh?’ 

Carmy, you little snark!!! This is very much his wheelhouse of expressing displeasure, he loves a little jab to the emotional solar plexus. My reading of his line is that what the reviewer tried and what Carmy tried are different, because if it had a ribbon of brine in it, I think that means that there was enough acid. Syd has two dishes, and she’s specific about Carmy trying one and not the other, so my reading here is that Carmy’s POV is not only did a dish go out of my kitchen without my sign off, but it was different from the dish I was given to try. Wince. Wince, wince, wince.

Sydney and Carmy have a fucking excruciating conversation.

Just the worst.

Carmy is not happy, but feels unable to voice this in a way that seems reasonable: he’s busy and stressed about to-gos, he hasn’t moved past the unreasonable feelings of resentment and annoyance to the clarity which enables you to articulate how you feel and why, and because Syd’s gamble paid off! It’s a net positive for the restaurant so it feels counterintuitive to reprimand her, but there is a conversation they need to have. He really does not want to have this conflict, because it’s complicated, and is, like most big blow outs over something small, about so much more than a plate of risotto.  He breezes over the conversation, but you can’t start with that ribbon of brine opener and then tell me shit’s not weird.

Compare this to Brigade, when Sydney is asked what’s up, and she is brave enough and vulnerable enough to be like – here are the things that weren’t OK, here are my expectations, here are my boundaries.

On the other side of the conversation, Sydney knows that she has slipped across a slightly odd boundary, but doesn’t acknowledge this. It’s good he liked it! All’s well that ends well. Right? RIGHT? But if he hadn’t? Very different conversation. It doesn’t matter who he is! He could have been anyone - someone that left a weird Instagram comment later, or someone who didn’t finish the meal and complained. Whatever the case may be, giving it to him unofficially was not an act of partnership, or listening, even if the initial communication was shitty.

She knows she’s overstepped,  but she doesn’t apologise and doesn’t acknowledge the specifics of what she’s done wrong, because she does not want to have the conflict that could come out of this either. She seeks affirmations that they are OK rather than trying to actually find out how Carmy feels and why, because at this point she doesn’t really want to hear it. She is seeking this conversation out 20 minutes before open! It’s not the time for a thorny, complex discussion.  

Compare this to Brigade. Carmy knows Sydney is pissed, and makes the effort to speak to her, in private, armed with the peace offering of Ebra’s Suqaar. He is very careful in that conversation to ask open questions (‘what’s going on with you? Say more?’) that enable her to respond honestly. He persists despite her having her walls up around the fact that she’s pissed. Sydney does not do this. The power dynamic makes it hard, but still. If she wants the connection needed to power reconciliation, that bravery needs to be in play.

are you sure we can't just power through this with sexual tension?

Sweeps congratulates her and tells her she’ll have to tell her dad

Hope Mr Adamu got a newspaper clipping!

Carmy says the sandwiches are totally different and the reviewer is a fucking hack. Syd looks sad.

This moment is why I opened this essay talking about veal stock. We are back in a moment with a gap between what has been said, and what has been heard. The reviewer said the sandwiches were delicious as ever. That’s not a criticism at all! These are not words that justify being called a hack! Carmy is pissed because the reviewer says they are delicious and they always have been, that Carmy has not improved on the staple that was there before him.

And that shit hurts his ego!

His whole thing was going off to learn ‘how to be better than mom and dad’s piece of shit’. We know he’s changed a bunch of things about the sandwiches. In Hands,  Sydney mentions that they’ve switched to market produce, which I’m sure is not unrelated to Richie’s ‘You’ve been here for two weeks and we’ve had money problems for two weeks’ in System. In Carmy’s time there, the bread’s changed, the method for cooking the beef has changed, the way they braise onions has changed.

To that customer? Delicious as ever.It’s not a dismissal, or an insult.  It is a reminder that Carmy didn’t have to leave, and go through all he went through, that there was delicious food and skills to be learned and refined without it. We know Michael was a talented chef. Even now, with all of where he’s been, Carmy cannot surpass him or his memory.

The person that does surpass that? Is Sydney. With food his palate did not deem good enough! Sydney who has not had to leave Chicago and her family. Sydney who has found a way to be creatively free, even at The Beef, in ways that Carmy has not really been able to, because his primary concern has to be money. There is understandable resentment here. But there is competition to the way Carmy cooks, something to prove, someone to smoke. There are reasonable feelings here, but some of them are really ugly, too.

Tina describes Syd as Jeff’s friend

This is a strange little line – because we know that Tina respects Syd as a chef at this point, and she doubles down on it later when she asks Syd to teach Louis skills, like she herself has been taught. So why’s it there? My feeling is that it’s there to remind the audience of what Syd and Carmy’s relationship is usually like. I wouldn’t call it friendship, I think they operate in a weird place that defies labels, but they have this synergy which drives the business. Tina evoking that in this moment draws attention to the fact that they are not in that space right now.

He's just got a very sweet face, it's hard for me to believe he's in trouble at school

Richie has a loud, performative conversation with Carmy about many things, but for the purpose of this section, he states that they don’t do risotto, asks if they’re going to, and Carmy definitively states that ‘no, they’re not going to do that’ he also repeats Syd’s phrasing that it was ‘an accident’

She stabbed the wrong ass if you ask me!

Nah, but for real, this is nasty work. I’m gonna come back to it in the next (penultimate!) bit of writing about the Beef, the Bear, Richie & Michael, Syd & Carmy. For now, I will simply say that Carmy is doing up major pass agg here, and it’s nasty to watch. He’s really, really unhappy with her,  and he’s struggling to hold it in, so it’s coming out in unhelpful and unpleasant ways that feel like humiliations in front of the whole team, and punishment.

There are really valid reasons for Carmy to be annoyed and to not want to talk about it right now.  The problem is that If you don’t create a pressure valve you take responsibility for, you will end up a) exploding instead (lol) and/or b) releasing that frustration in unhelpful and harmful ways.

They move towards this with their ASL sorry in Season Two. But here, Carmy says and implies a bunch of things to Richie that he needed to say explicitly to Syd two episodes ago, and two minutes ago: that he has no intention of putting risotto on the menu, and that he thinks her saying it was an accident was bullshit. He wants Syd to know it’s not OK without the hard, painful work of having to engage in conflict with her. It’s shitty.

Sweet Louis asks what a ribbon of brine is

He seems like a good boy, bring him back!

A BUNCH OF STUFF THAT I WILL WRITE ABOUT NEXT TIME HAPPENS

Richie, Syd and Carmy, it’s delicious (a nightmare).

Syd attempts a second conversation with Carmy – having vented some frustration  at Richie, and seeing how her workload is piling up and becoming untenable, she is much more open here. Carmy is not.

She’s blunt – we’re not on the same page. Carmy lies and deflects – we’re good, let’s get through the shift. He has his hands on his hips, with as much of his body turned away from her as possible, during this conversation, and walks off half way through it. Even if everything had gone right, this shift would have been a nightmare for Syd.

Everything is awesome!

The penultimate mention of the risotto is here. There is very little I can say that has not been brilliantly said by eatandsleepwell here - https://www.tumblr.com/hourglassfish/726487509540962304/eatandsleepwell-melonatures-this-one-second?source=share so I’m gonna link it.

That’s the last we hear of risotto for now, other than a quick reference to Syd as an arrogant and condescending ribbon of brine from Richie later. It doesn’t turn up on the tasting menu at the Bear, where it defo feels like a riff on risotto could have replaced one of their pasta dishes. That switch from rice to pasta feels pointed.

Spaghetti

Let’s treat The Beef as a character. If Sydney’s ingredient motif is veal stock, then The Beef’s is that family spaghetti.

Cheap and simple. Fucking delicious. Makes no sense and shouldn’t work, but was somehow the best seller on the menu. Distinctively Italian. Stuffed full of drug money(!). Always, always presented at the table with love, like a gift. You can elevate it if you want, but the fact of the matter is that even at its very best, it’s only gonna hit so hard cus it reminds you of simpler times, like the ratatouille (that is not a ratatouille!) from the movie Ratatouille.

Carmy rejects that meal at the top of the series. It ‘doesn’t make sense on the menu’, so he doesn’t care that people loved it. So far, so EMP. When he starts to cook it in episode one, it feels like a relenting to Richie’s bullying, and him throwing WHAT WE NOW KNOW WAS PROBABLY A FEW THOUSAND DOLLARS in the bin at the end of the episode feels like this exhilarating rejection of mediocrity. They change the lines for System, but in the pilot, Carmy literally cannot make the spaghetti, that last lesson from Michael is a real missing puzzle piece.

In Braciole,  when he gets the recipe, he goes to cook it, for family. It’s really nice, that scene, feels comparable to Sydney making omelette. It’s quiet, and Carmy seems content, if wistful. The pork instead of beef panic of earlier is put to the side for now. The previous day, Carmy has gone to Al-Anon and confessed, unburdened himself. Then followed two quiet days and a blue hued night of atonement: he reaffirmed his commitment to Richie, paying his bail and keeping watch all night, gave Tina the night off, apologised to Marcus and acknowledged that his behaviour towards Sydney wasn’t acceptable, as well as speaking to her about her dish, like an adult. Carmy has to do all of this before he finds the money, before he gets the validation that he’s really longing for from his brother.

JAW getting his Emmy, his Golden Globe, his SAG Award, his Bafta, his future Oscar Winning role.

If The Bear at its core is about grief, and the void that Michael’s death leaves, then one of the big journeys of Season One is the subsequent death of the Beef, ready for its rebirth as The Bear in the following season. Review is the short sharp stab to the gut, of Sydney leaving, and taking any hope that it can be reformed as is, with her work. I don’t think the nature of a puncture wound, and the shortness of that episode are unrelated.

Braciole is more of a death rattle: Jimmy’s debt keeping them trapped in shitty work they don’t want to do, situations that spiral out of control and descend into violence, their parachute turned to bail money. But Michael wanted more for his brother than that, and he has left him a foundation. He does not have to burn the place down, there need not be smoke and hellfire. There’s another avenue for rebirth, one where ‘set this place on fire’ does not have to mean an insurance scam, but instead can mean an ignition of all their ambition and dreams.

To get there there has to be an ego death first, a moment of hubris that gets our protagonists fresh, and clean, so they can move to the new. Sydney sees and experiences the worst of herself (more on this in the final part!). Richie gets stabbed (more on this in the next part).

Carmy? Carmy has to encountera crisis where not only could his training not save him but many of the lessons he learnt while he was away and his reasons for going in the first place actively made the situation worse, and those that had faith in him and his preferred system turned away from him, deeply hurt. His ego gets in the way of connection, and it shatters the partnership that he needs to make it all work. He is clinging to old ways of being that has not served him, but he needs to move forward into what is new. And he does.

Well.

He tries.

SMDH

WHEW

Another long one, sorry fam. I’m almost there though. Am I sorry? No, I’m grateful if you read it, and I hope you enjoyed it.

I hope I’m pulling this together coherently, that I’m showing a sort of throughline to the way I view Episode 7. I don’t think Sydney is perfect! I do think her walking out is narratively and politically (the show wants better for the workplaces its drawn from) necessary, and I hate, hate, hate the simplification of that decision to ‘he shouted at her so she bailed’. Please, you can’t think this show is well written and think her decision is as simple as that, it doesn’t make sense. That exit is crafted so that it is inevitable, there is a movie’s worth of build up to it.

We’re looking at Richie, Syd and Carmy next time, fam. I am trying so hard to cut it down cus it’s currently sat at 15,000 words, but I’m gonna try really hard to edit down, OK? I’m gonna try really hard.

I can’t respond but I value reblogs and comments so much!

This is part of a five part series! You can find the rest here:

Expect More: Syd and Carmy's relationship,

I know you'll be listening: Marcus, McDonald's and Freedom

Risottogate

Hiring New Fucking Broads: Syd, Richie and conflict;

"That's Not You" The Moment Syd Walks Out

[hourglassfish]

A nerd speaks

Quick note – all my writing here has been so long, and so dense. It feels a) a bit sad, and b) like I should apologise. Especially cus the one I’m working on about Syd and Richie is gonna be a fucking beast I think.

But it’s really been fun to me to do some writing that is not for my job? And I feel really inspired by lots of the meta I find here. So thanks to the community of people thinking out loud about The Bear! And if you are reading this, I’m really grateful, and I really welcome and appreciate comments. I keep trying to respond but it will only let me do that from my danmei account, for some reason, and I’m trying not to cross the streams.

Also to say I am neutral in any and all shipping discourse, I support hopeless romantics (sydmarcuses), platonics (down with love corners!), the horny romantics (sydcarmys), AND the chaos gremlins (sydrichies). I have time for lovers of American indie films (clairecarmys), fans of european cinema (luca/marcus, luca/carmy) traditional slash shippers (richie/carmy, Richie/mikey, carm/new York chef). I will respectfully RESPECTFULLY sit separately from those whose honesty about their own fantasies I can only aspire to ( x reader folks, god bless you), but I WILL make eye contact and share a solidarity based nod.

Me personally? I wanna talk about HR!

I also want  Carmy to get a pet. Maybe like the ugliest dog you’ve ever seen, like a really smelly one that is actively incongruent with the rest of his life but he loves them, and they love him. A pet demands that you get some fucking perspective, because whatever happens they need feeding and walking, and cleaning and playing with and hugging or whatever. It is also an incredible thing, when you feel fundamentally unlovable, to be loved by a creature who reminds you of the beauty of the universe, AND just wants to hang out together as they enjoy their existence. So, you know. That might be good for him.  

Maybe also for him to do some travelling that is not related to work. Could we send him to trek through a jungle or something? Something physically and mentally demanding enough that he doesn’t freak out at the stillness, but outside with lots of fresh air, very different to a kitchen and the chance to look at beauty and maybe eat new things, Cus he’ll want that.

OK, bye now xxx

[hourglassfish]

me: it’s unrealistic that the walk in at the bear would go unfixed for three months, or not have a safety mechanism in the inside -

Pret A Manger: we stand in solidarity with our boy Carmy

[hourglassfish]

Carmy + encouraging his team

THE BEAR season 2

[hourglassfish]

A (long) Aside on 1:7 and 2:10

There are two responses to 1:7 and 2:10 that always quietly horrify me.

The first, and you know, I'm writing a multi part series on it, so it's no mystery - is that Sydney was arrogant/a brat/ couldn't hack it/ wrong to walk out, and that the situation as a whole was her fault. Nah. She was right to walk out, the biggest failure of that episode is not fucking pulling the breaks when Richie gets stabbed. The workplace has gone from dysfunctional to dangerous, she has been responsible for that danger, the perpetrator of it, and she is right to leave.

little bit of an asshole but i love you so i don't care

Carmy sees Syd saying she's going to stab Richie (as she holds her knife to his chest!) while they're up in each other's faces (with Richie goading her) and he does... nothing. He tells them to shut the fuck up and make giardiniera. At this point they needed to be separated! One or both of them needed to cool off. We've seen Syd bodily put herself between a fighting Carmy and Richie. A little reciprocity would have gone a long way here.

It's wild to me that people think that Carmy was justified in his anger and aggression towards Marcus and Syd and ignore that he is aggressive to Richie also! Richie, typically one of the more confrontational characters in the show asks him to calm down, to cool it. That so many viewers so quickly and uncritically accept Carmy's narrative point of view, even while the show actively challenges it confirms something that has been in the culture a long time: that we are much more used to excusing and aligning ourselves with abusive behaviour, than we are at challenging and refusing it. That people - many of whom have received this kind of behaviour themselves - want to defend it, makes me so, so sad.

It always hurts me a little that in 1:8 Tina tells Carmy that if he 'tries that shit with her, she'll fuck him up'. It's a fun line! But I'm sorry, no she won't. He screams at her too, while chucking bowls around and Sydney's words in 1:7 clearly hurt her. Tina categorically did nothing wrong. She doesn't deserve that shit. But at the end of the day, she is a middle aged Latinx woman and a mother, and so her tolerance level has to be higher. She needs that job! Shedoes not, as far as we know, have a father she can live with rent free, she does not have youth and the promise of exploitable potential to offer to employers in an ageist job market, she does not have CIA qualifications or a CV full of ‘serious heat’.

Carmy. holds. a. position. of. power. over. these. people. He is their boss, not their manager, and he owns the place, mob loan or no. He has the power to sack them all, to cut their hours, to cut their wages; thus the impact of that power extends not just to them, but also to their children and families. Louis being present in Review is not just to add an obstacle, it's also a reminder of those stakes.

Carmy has influence in the fine dining industry, regardless of whether that social and cultural capital is respected at The Beef or not. The very same oppourtunities that he provides them with in season 2 are things he could also lock them out of if he so chose. Any analysis of 1:7 that ignores this power is flawed from its root. When you are a boss, this power is ever present. One of the few things you can do to alter your boss's behaviour is to withdraw your labour. It's not the only option you have, but everything else is at their discretion, or mediated by lengthy, expensive legal processes.

yeh, i hate this

Carmy knows this, even if you don't! It's why the apology he gives Marcus - which Marcus does not ask for - is so heartfelt. Carmy has been on the receiving end of what that power, wielded cruelly, can do. He does not want to do this to others. We see him talk to staff with respect even while he endures horrid abuse in a flashback. We see him teach and explain himself, we see him listen and invite feedback - ‘say more’. His commitment to being a good boss is sincere, that kindness is in his bones.

The second thing people say that makes me want to die a little inside is that Carmy bought getting locked in the fridge on himself, that he deserved it in some way, and that getting locked in the fridge was him abandoning Sydney.

Oh my god!

He does not have a diagnosis yet - so anything we see is an interpretation. But it feels explicit that Carmy has panic disorder, and perhaps generalised anxiety disorder and CPTSD from both his workplace experiences and his childhood. A couple of things that he says and does suggest ADHD, or some other neurodiversity. He is not very careful with himself, and does not recognise these things as treatable problems (Richie says he experiences anxiety and dread, Carmy's response is 'who doesn't' - wince, cruel to Richie, cruel to himself - vomiting everyday and crying out of nowhere are presented as something 'loads of people do' to Sugar. Tumblr loves to send people to therapy, but I just want to send this man to do a basic google search of more than fun tbh). But they are debilitating for him, especially at work.

What happens to how we read Carmy's behaviour when he is presented as someone with an untreated disability, and absolutely no support plan in place? Does he still get his just desserts at the end of the season?

The fridge thing is a bit clumsy, I think. It's silly that over the space of three months, no one at any point just takes that job off him as a priority, or at least makes it something where Tony will call the restaurant, not Carmy specifically. It is unrealistic that there would not be some kind of back up safety lock inside the fridge. But you know, they're characters in a TV show, it also does not take two people swivelling around on the floor to tighten the coat hooks on a table (LOOOOOOL) - it's realistic until its not.

But, you know, it's doing a thing, several things - it's Chekov's gun, isn't it, it's the tangible impact of the lapse of focus that Uncle Jimmy is constantly trying to warn them about.

He wanted to cry here so bad!!! It makes me laugh every time

But umm... guys? What happens to him on that night is so, so horrible. They're a chef down, they're running out of forks, Richie's giving him shit (and Carmy is so susceptible to Richie giving him shit), Marcus and Syd are being all weird. He thinks one of his abusers (Donna) might come, or that she might not come and there will be emotional fallout from that. He thinks he sees his other abuser (Evil Joel Mc Hale) - and he's triggered. He goes in the kitchen and yells, but Syd pulls him back in. Then he goes into the fridge, partly to do chef stuff, I'm sure, but also partly to fucking get his shit together aaaaaand he gets locked in there! He has a panic attack! In a fridge! That he is locked in! And the people he loves most in the world, are the other side of that door, and for five minutes, an eternity in panic attack time, they ignore him! He has no clue what's going on! Last time shit hit the fan, two of his staff walked out (he's still not over Syd walking out cus they never talk about it properly), another one got stabbed and all these new ones are 'emerald green'. And he still thinks evil Joel Mc Hale is out there!

My loves, that shit is the stuff of nightmares! I know he tells himself that he bought this on himself but can we please! stop! uncritically! accepting! his narrative! point! of view!

I don't think anybody on screen recognises that a panic attack is what he's having. That's not their fault. None of them have seen him have a panic attack! They don’t get to see inside his head like we do (which saves them from a lot of R.E.M.) He is locked in the fridge, they just hear the bear banging on the door of his cage! It's not even in the language of the show at this point (though i am curious about how and when Richie came to get his Xanax). But that's what's happening. The team are fine. They do great. He has a terrible, terrible time.

My support worker found 2:10 deeply triggering - and her reason for this, she said, was that a lot of her job was supporting people with panic disorders who are leading teams, and seeing that moment coming, the moment where the panic crashes headlong into their role as leader. Part of her role is anticipating it, and trying to turn it around before they reach the point of no return. And as soon as Carmy thinks he sees Old Boss, he's gone. His body is in flight or fight, and he is alone with that. He can’t show up for Syd at that point, he is in his equivalent of the trenches.

This is also what is happening in 1:7. Somehow his response is often framed as a) rational or b) just an asshole - but it is so outsize to the situation, and to who we know him to be most of the time (quiet, kind, thoughtful, sensitive, BITCHY), that we know it has to be more than that.

None of this is helped by the fact that Carmy's panic attacks are... well they're kind of ugly! His meltdowns are aggressive and shouty, on the edge of physical violence, in an industry where people behave like that because they can. It is hard, parsing through that to the triggers, and fears, and panic beneath. It's scary! It asks so much of people to see that and want to help, not run away. But that is where he's at.

I do not have language for how much I hate how physical he gets with Marcus here, it is deeply upsetting

I have an access rider, to help me work well with people, and to help them work well with me. My mental health turns up in every job I do. All the time. Has done for years. It can make me unreliable, uncommunicative and absent. It can mean that people have to step up sometimes in ways they weren't anticipating. And one of the things the rider asks for is 'Good Faith' - a belief that I have not shut down because I'm an asshole, but rather because I have some unhelpful coping mechanisms that I am trying to work my way out of, that my triggers are real, not excuses for laziness or an expression of lack of care, that i will give as much as I can when I can.

Syd and Carmy are beginning to work towards this - Carmy says over and over again that he doesn't want to be shitty. Claire fucking muddies things, because I will not meet you skiving off to see your girlfriend with good faith fam. That shit he needs to be held accountable for. Dropping that envelope was a perfect Richie job, I'm still pissed about that. But being locked in the fridge... there's way more going on there.

The idea that Carmy should, and will, leave the culinary world keeps coming up in various metas. But... the problem isn't cooking? I think Carmy loves cooking, still. I think he likes being part of a team, and wants to be good at it. I think he likes teaching, and he is good at that. I think he likes picking the right silent plates and having his CDC in Thom Browne. I also think he likes being there a lot and being absorbed by his job.

The problem is that the workplace he is in is not one that is set up to his needs right now - it's not set up so that he can rest enough, so that he can eat well, so that he can exercise, or whatever he needs to do to help him manage his brain and nervous system. It's not set up so that if he is triggered, he and his team knows how to keep going with the service *and* not abandon him to the worst of his brain.

Ohhhh it's bad

Carmy ignoring Claire's call and not calling Tony feels bizarre stripped of the context of his panic attack that morning. But we know that anxiety and panic and executive dysfunction take simple things and make them insurmountable. It's not about Sydney in that moment, or even really about Claire*, and self sabotage feels so weighted with judgement when I think about what those frozen moments feel like from the inside. And I've had my diagnoses for 12 years! I've been doing that work, the long slog of trying to make sure my employees know enough context that my MH doesn't fuck up their day, whilst also maintaining my own dignity and right to privacy.

The disentangling of symptoms from personality traits is so hard - fuck ups from trauma responses, what was preventable, and what might have happened even if you did everything right. I never want to lose sight of compassion for Carmy, and the reality of how long it takes to break those cycles.

I also never want to stop seeing the power that he has over the people that he works with, and how, unfortunately, one of the responsibilities of leadership is that you have to be trying to get your shit together, you have to know yourself, and know how your baggage, combined with your power could be creating harm. It’s hard, but there’s not way around it. It is essential that he gets the support he needs, and puts the measures in place that means that he can also be vulnerable, not just for him, but for the team as whole. The power and the lack of framework together are so very harmful for everyone.

makes for delicious tv though 😉

I think a lot about the ticket machines in The Bear. I'm not thinking about them as a former line chef, cus I'm not that, I'm an artist and writer, that waitressed for a while (while a lot of chefs did a lot of coke out back!) and The Bear is fiction, not a documentary. Those little tickets are used for so many things. They're the sound of pressure. They're where a bunch of intrusive thoughts get flashed up on the screen. They are the presence of tech and of speed and alienation. They are the gap where two human beings, one asking for food, and one cooking that food, become consumer and producer. They are a presence of the machine in the workplace, and they stand in for Marcus's machines in McDonald's and for Evil Joel McHale and for financial failure.

One of the things that capitalism demands is that we always listen to that machine. That when we are making a choice, between the people stood around us, who we work with daily, who we live massive chunks of our life with, and the demand for production for go go go - that we choose the latter, even if it harms the former. That we open for service, even though one of our oldest friends just got stabbed. That we prioritise getting the service turned around on Friends and Family night (the easiest night of the year to go out, pour more wine, and say service is a little delayed, but we've got this), rather than maybe asking Fak or even Claire, to come and talk to Carmy through the door, as well, make sure that he's OK. That we just keep going.

And there are so many really important reasons to do that! Keeping going is how we learn and grow, it's how we make sure that we can pay the bills, how we provide beautiful experiences for customers and guests who are more than consumers to us.

But at some point, we have to ask at what cost. When do we stop and make different? When do we try something else, make new systems, that work for us?

A moment - a small, tiny moment - of triumph for me, is when Richie and Syd turn the table around. So rather than one person, facing the tickets alone, with their back to the kitchen as they yell out orders, the person on Expo faces in. yes they can see the tickets, but they can also see the people they are working with. They can see stress, and worry and joy. They can see how hard they are working. They can see that they are not alone, not just in a promise before service, but during service, when you need that connection most.

My hope is that Season 3 will have more of them making these decisions - ones that lean into seeing each other, where their relationships keep growing, and they build a system where the love and care they have for each other is truthfully at the heart of it.

Richie is not my bag, that's just for me, personally, but I get how much he means to others, and he's beautiful here.

*Man, I do think the romance subplot was a bit of a misstep. Pop always feels like such a waste of the audience's time, time not spent with Ebra and Tina, time spent on a presentation of romance that has been done to death and is never especially satisfying. Truncates a lot of empathy for Carmy. Boo. Hiss.

[hourglassfish]

On Season 1, Episode 7 : Part Two : I Know You’ll Be Listening: Marcus, McDonalds and Freedom

Gonna talk about my fave episode! Sheridan. It’s got some of my favourite music in it – and there’s a catching of breath after lots and lots of change, which gives you time to see characters relax, and have them show you who they are when not in a crisis, to hear them reflect a little, and to get sense of who they might want to be, and where they’ve come from.

It also develops the triangle of Marcus / Sydney / Carmy. Now when I say triangle here, I’m not talking about a love corner! This is a sydcarmy safe space, but I am interested in their work dynamics! Some of the most beautiful moments of the entire season happen when these three are in flow together, and they are united by food as artistic expression.

They are unique in this.  Tina is more skill focused and analytic – Science Baby! – she likes upskilling, her game improving, doing things the right way. Sweeps is about his money, when they budget for the restaurant he immediately backs Tina up about their pay ‘she’s right about that Jefferson’, and he sits with Nat and Richie post apology, doubling down on the fact the restaurant needs to work, that all the workers are invested in that. Ebra’s relationship with food is a tangible connection to home – he cooks Suqaar, his memories of Somalia are never far from his dialogue. It roots him in two places at the same time, a delicate dance that all immigrants are constantly learning, re learning and revising the steps to. Richie’s relationship with food is concerned with people, place and tradition – beef has been cooked here like this since before you were born, people loved the spaghetti and you can’t get the recipe, a very clear sense of hot dogs NOT coming with ketchup (which is very Chicago, if I recall correctly).

But for these three? It’s a practice of freedom. At it's best, that's what creative expression is, it's freedom, and its why we fight for it so very hard. Let's get into it.

The episode starts with the building literally falling down around their ears – gas, electricity, plumbing – it’s all out. Look at Syd and Marcus's faces when the toilet blows up, I love it when these two react to something together -

Even within that, we see pops of joy for all of them – Marcus enthusiastically enthusing about his book, Sydney gently pitching a new dish, Carmy teaching – tape, roasted onions, his mom’s chicken.

When the fuse blows, Carmy is in the middle of dealing with the ghosts of the Beef – drug deals and the spectre of financial ruin, Covid and his own absence, addiction and Michael, Michael, Michael. Marcus is frantically trying to catch up with work, having gotten a little lost in his donuts (Carmy warns him about this repeatedly, he’s permissive, but he can see it’s becoming a problem). Sydney is my perfect daughter who never does anything wrong (HAH) so she is innocuously cooking a risotto which will lead to big problems later.

But it dictates where they all go in this next episode – Carmy is back enmeshed with his family, and in problem solving mode, so off he goes to Nat’s with Richie to be called a soft shitty bitch (😭 he does get a hug for going Al anon though). Marcus messes up, sulks a little, then is pulled back in (he’s deeply sensitive, and as we learn from season 2 and all he is carrying with his mum, vulnerable. He’s maybe the youngest team member?). But Sydney stays in her flow state, and it enhances her work, opens her creativity, and keeps her focused.

Sheridan clearly meant so much to her. She lost everything, and still lives surrounded by the boxes of it. One of the most poignant moments of her season comes when she stokes the fire for their makeshift post-gas, post-electricity BBQ and for a moment flashes back to some gorgeous prawns, cooking on a similar fire. She looks like she’s about to cry. When she serves food to people who she can see eat and enjoy it later that episode, we see her biggest grin – we won’t see her grin that big again until Sugar calls her a genius in Omelette. So much of being a line cook is being in a kitchen, alienated from your labour separated from the joy that what you’recooking brings to those who are eating it. The praise and enjoyment of what she’s created is a big motivator for her, as it would be for anyone, and this  goes someway to explaining why she doesn’t want a dish she thinks is delicious (should have given Carm the one with the ribbon of brine babes) to not be eaten by someone.

If we hop back across to Marcus in this episode, we get some of Carmy being an excellent boss (that’s my boy!!!) – his conversation with Marcus (who appears to just be moping outside while the others work… young man get it together) is really beautiful. He’s curious. Not only does he ask him how he is, he really listens when Marcus talks about McDonalds, gets down on his level, does his very intense staring thing: he wants to understand where Marcus is coming from. He resists narratives of blame and fault – the job’s insane and  fuck ups happen. But he is also clear about the bottom line (you gotta stay ahead of your work, that’s just that). He doubles down on the moment of empathy and connection by sharing a story of his own failures after a huge success. Marcus goes back to work with a huge grin on his face. For me, it’s as beautiful and important a conversation as the talk between Syd and Carmy in Brigade, another affirmation that The Beef can be different from all the other places they’ve been at.

This episode has a really beautiful symmetry to its narrative structure, so we later return to the three of them in the kitchen – Marcus quietly labelling up his eggs, with the neat lines Carmy favours (Wilco sings ‘I know you’ll be listening’), and Carmy and Syd cooking together (that prawn stock business looked wild delicious) and really talking and listening.

I used to work at a purveyor of moderately priced soaps. And the soaps are quite hippyish, but their business model is not, and it always felt like a contradiction, until I met their owners, who spoke about their business going bust in the 90s. They’re a huge global brand now, but losing that small, postal based service was clearly something that they carried with them, decades later. It is, like any grief, something that informs many of their decisions, for better or worse, especially because they parted ways with another brand where they felt stifled, to set up their own thing, centring their values. I think about them a lot when I think about Syd, and my own business.

It is not lost on me that Syd talks here about money – getting too big too fast, fucked credit,  bad decisions. The bad credit especially sticks with me, because that shit traps you. Makes renting, or making significant purchases hard, makes starting another business impossible – a bunch of doors shut and they don’t reopen for years, and you are reminded of it constantly. It puts all her creativity in a box – the same way that the mechanical efficiency of Mc Donald’s inhibits what we are to learn is a prodigious talent in Marcus, out of sight. That failure is always there for her, and I think it’s why she is so quick to look at where the Bear is haemorrhaging money and want to find solutions. There is a chance here. She grabs it. She will give all her learning in exchange for that outlet.

PAUSE

The moment when Syd says ‘it was the first time I didn’t have a complete and utter psychopath behind me screaming and pushing and yelling’ and then they cut to Carm stood behind her is SO MEAN, it makes me CHORTLE every time, girl he’s RIGHT THERE! I know they were laughing in the edit when they put this bit together.

When she speaks about her failure, his response is ‘Heard’ – I don’t think he really knows how to respond – like… has  Carmy ever failed? Syd’s face does a weird little thing when he says that. Heard. Listened? Does he really get the depth of loss for her? Has he ever experienced that kind of freedom in a kitchen? Cus if he hasn’t maybe he can’t really understand what it is to lose it. Maybe you can’t know that loss util you experience it. Carmy always knew The Beef was there. Was always trying to get back to it, had it as a north star. But Sydney built her own and then lost it, and it was her own fault*.

That being said, she does still ask him for help in this scene. It’s a clear progression in her letting her walls down after the veal stock fiasco of Brigade. Wilco comes in again –

This is what love is for To be out of place Gorgeous and alone Face to face With no larger problems That need to be erased Nothing more important Than to know someone's listening Now, I know you'll be listening

– these three have connected here, and are starting to build the bonds that are going to send Marcus on Carmy’s pilgrimage to Copenhagen. The Michael starts in this quiet moment.

But listening - hearing, retaining, actioning, bearing it all in mind - is the centre of this bond, and it fractures quickly when they stop doing that. They're still getting to know each other. Relationships in their infancy.

I think these moments – this episode – are important when we think about what happens in Episode 7, who quits and why. Not only are these the two newest recruits to the Bear, they’re also the two with the least connection to Michael, and emotional relationships with Carmy that are not haunted by his ghost. They’ve been Carmy’s quickest and most loyal supporters up until this point, and there is a clear sense of betrayal communicated during Review from all three. It feels like there was a shared understanding that Marcus’s creativity would be appreciated (that’s why he puts so very much into it) - that it would be different. But when he achieves his goal, one he has slept on the floor of The Beef for, it is met with aggression and destruction. There was an understanding that Syd walked away from kitchens because of the shouting pyscho, and Carmy is the only reason she has walked back. But it's a hard boundary for her, and Carmy regresses to that in a crisis. Carm has invested a lot of trust in these two, and feels betrayed, personally (why are you fucking with me x 4) by Marcus’s perceived lack of focus (he warned him) during said crisis and by risotto gate, as well as Syd’s leaving (what are you doing x4).

The Beef is not just a job for any of the characters, they all really care about it – but there is something specific about creative expression – the way in which it is the movement of the universe through you as a vessel, its uniquely human quality, the way it leaves shards of your soul littered throughout the world that is very specific, and I think Syd and Marcus both feel punished for their creativity here, but, more importantly, they both know it’s worth – and that’s a huge part of why they leave. They are giving more than labour, and they value it accordingly. As they should. I will keep saying it, again and again - I am glad they both leave, that they reject dysfunction and abuse. More importantly, I am glad that the show supports their decision - we don't see them apologise to Carmen because the writers frame his behaviour as not OK, in numerous ways. This framing is a part of the optimism The Bear, this belief that things can - and should - be better for it's workers.

It is not lost on me that the same people that wrote this episode are now on strike, and come from another industry that we know to be riddled with abuses. Some of us (me) know this from experience.

We should talk about risotto next.

This is part of a five part series! You can find the rest here:

Expect More: Syd and Carmy's relationship,

I know you'll be listening: Marcus, McDonald's and Freedom

Risottogate

Hiring New Fucking Broads: Syd, Richie and conflict;

"That's Not You" The Moment Syd Walks Out

*in hindsight, this scene is a paralell to the moment in Pasta when they speak about the Michelin star call at Carmy's place. I think Sydney hears Carmy's dread, but I'm not convinced she's really listening, or connecting that with his 'trapped' from the previous episode's business pitch to Jimmy. These two, eh? It's not their fault they're in a TV show, but I wish they'd ask more follow up questions.

[hourglassfish]

You are right and you should say it 😭

like I really get Marcus’s POV here - he has just killed it with the desserts, he’s feeling confident and assured - no better time to shoot your shot! He can get really giddy when he’s been successful (donuts!). It’s not great professionally, but it’s also such a misread of who she is and where she’s at in the moment - and it’s gotta be super disorienting for her, cus Marcus has been such consistent support when others 🔵🔵 have not.

When he comes out in the dining room later, it’s the only time we see her make herself look smaller -

As she hunches over and turns away, and as a Syd lover, it breaks my heart a little. Carmy and Richie both clocking the tension, even if they don’t say anything… argh! Marcus, why babes 😭

she does deal with it terribly though, it’s not ok Marcus blows up at her, but it’s very, very understandable.

I love Marcus, but still, if I was Syd I would be pissed if he asked me out in the middle of a very hectic and stressful working hours. And then he accuses her of being extra rude because of that. Are you serious have you seen my girl?! She doesn't have time to ignore her staff because of such little things. And Marcus's character is mature enough to know when and where it is appropriate to ask someone out.

[hourglassfish]

this one second exchange makes me understand ep7 better.

look at gary in the firs screencap, and look at tina’s son in the second one. they’re just standing there. and yet the moment for me as a viewer is like. not a just standing there moment. 

for the past like minute carmen has been freaking out about the to go orders. like *he* has been the one talking this entire time. sydney says one (1) thing, “what does this (her dish) have to do with this (the to go orders).” and carmen says “chef stop, stop” as if *she* has been the one flipping out for the past minute. 

his reaction is outsize to her question. because 1) he’s not responding to her actual question, but to the panic the situation is causing in him, which is *tumblr speak* a trauma response, and also “the situation” is not just the to go orders, but mikey rejecting him and killing himself, and owing 300k to a mobster, and being financially insolvent, and his successful career being the result of an effort to get mikey to see him, and syd not trusting him enough to listen to him, and the to go orders; and 2) because he does not want to approach his issue with syd’s having served her dish after he told her not to, like he doesn’t want to be upset with her about that and the rave review she got after he told her no, he prefers to be upset with her about the to go orders (this is not conscious on his part, he doesn’t do this on purpose).

you know the unreliable narrator? that’s not what’s happening here exactly, but something similar, in that the camera/narrative is *so* close to carmen that what we experience is his total (outsized, misplaced) panic. for example, people keep saying what the fuck was marcus doing messing with donuts and not making cakes–even though if he was on time with cakes there is no way he would have made enough for all the orders coming in. like, remember that nytimes article about how “honest” work will not save carmen? honest work would not have saved marcus. it would not have saved any of them that day. 

But when Carmy returns to Chicago, he finds his elders are either absent or trying to exploit him, and the only girl who’s interested in his feelings is his sister. Just as success failed to save him, honest work won’t either; it won’t even generate enough money to get by. The Original Beef may signal noble, can-do labor, but it’s also a decompensating system on the verge of structural collapse.

so, what if the camera had followed/been close to marcus during ‘review,’ *instead* of carmen? we as viewers would have been totally outside of witnessing carmen’s panic. like the way it eclipsed everything? it would not have eclipsed the audience because it didn’t touch marcus until he went up to carmen and carmen flipped out at him. 

or what if it had followed gary or tina’s son? or manny and angel who totally ignore him?

the camera’s closeness to carmen’s emotional and psychological state is also part of why the ep has to end where it does. marcus leaves, syd leaves, and carmen deflates, and the camera is at a distance watching him eat marcus’s donut off the floor, then tracks him walking into the freezer until he disappears behind the wall (covered in all the workers documentation, lolllll, the irony) and we’re given reprieve from his mental state.

another way to point out the camera’s and narrative’s closeness to carmen’s psyche. that classic ep of the american version to the office, where dwight carves off the cardiac mannequin’s face and stanley has a heart attack. that is also a high intensity, totally bonkers sequence with one camera (though not one shot). but because it’s a comedy and the audience needs to see more than one character to get the full spectrum of how ridiculous everything is, the camera/narrative is more impartial, is like, a step away from any one character.

does any of this make sense?

[hourglassfish]

syd + looking cute in her detachable hood

[hourglassfish]

Hello,

so I feel like what I’ve said and what you’ve heard might be different things.

I said -

‘I don’t believe those acts of love can or should or are restricted to the role of wife or romantic lover’

‘western cultures, particularly the heteropatriachal white ones, do not have enough language for all the kinds of love there are’

‘So much of heteropatriarchy runs on the notion that there is one special person that will fulfill if not all, then at least the vast majority of our needs - but I don’t think this is true, I think it’s a myth that actively fucks us all over. It makes life cold and terrifying when you’re single, and it can trap you in bad relationships if you fear they’re going to be the only source of care’

but it reads like what you heard was:

romance is at the heart of patriarchy (and as such one cannot exist without the other)

it is tainted, corrupted, less queer to feel deeply or want to experience marriage

that the way that you, personally, feel about marriage is not valid.

so I guess my responses would be -

I don’t think romance is at the heart of heteropatriarchy, and I acknowledge that my language here could be clearer. If you want to make the point that romance is not a necessary condition of patriarchy, point conceded without pushback 🫡 I do think notions of romance are used, in conjunction with other approaches, and to great effect, to extract labour from women and to eventually split us into neat, small, alienated households of 2-4, which cannot fulfil all of our complex needs, both emotional and material. Romance as the carrot to violence’s stick. Definitely in the current, western, iteration of it, where romantic love and love within the nuclear family is held up as the love above all other loves. This does not make romance a bad thing, far from it! It wouldn’t work if it was! But it doesn’t all have to reside in one person, in one type of relationship. I also did not say that heteropatriarchy was ‘a timeless thing’, as I think the opposite, and it’s evolution is a part of the tension here. Very much on board with the Kathy Peiss quote - ‘a source of autonomy and pleasure as well as a cause of their continuing oppression’ - this reminds me of a lot of Saidiyah Hartman’s work in Wayward Lives

I mean I simply do not feel that, nor have I said it. Queerness offers space to challenge those hierarchies of love, and I think that’s important and deserves to be uplifted, because of all the people excluded by marriage and the nuclear family as a structure. We live in a culture that venerates romantic love and marriage! Years of queer activism went into fighting for same sex marriage, it is still seen as one of the landmarks of liberation.

I do not feel this, I’m talking about Syd and Carmy, who are very much not married. I am sorry that you have had experiences in queer spaces where the importance you place on romance and marriage has not been respected. That is not what is happening here. I do not want romantic and sexual love to become less treasured - I simply want more types of relationship to be held as though they too, are sacred, for that erotic energy (erotic as understood and defined by Audre Lorde) to be spread across multiple relationships. This is what most of my post was about!

“platonic soulmate” sounds, to me, an awful lot like doing all the work of being someone’s wife and then not getting all the benefits - someone to hold you when you’re sad or sick or just need a cuddle, someone to do half the chores, someone who makes you feel special, makes you laugh, takes care of you, listens to you and takes your feelings seriously, who takes your side, who puts the time and effort and love in to learn to fuck you just right

i’m not sure how it’s more “feminist” and “pure” to imagine a woman getting a raw deal like that. or why another man or woman (if she’s queer) would put up with her giving all of that wife-y care and time and passion (for minimum 14-16+ hours out of 24, six days a week) and energy away to a “platonic soulmate”

how is that more feminist than a woman wanting and then getting what she wants and all the pleasures and costs that come with it? why is only paying the cost and not getting the full deal inherently purer?

anyway here’s Wonderwall Sappho (translated by Anne Carson)

because I prayed this word: I want

[hourglassfish]

I really love your account and your thoughts on the bear!

I really struggle with this discourse around romantic, platonic and sexual love within the bear, and between Syd and Carmy. I feel like it reveals a lot of the limits we place on 'love' as a concept, but also on how we understand Black women in culture.

Cus like - let's get it out the way - would we need to keep making this point if she was a white woman? Swap her and Molly Gordon around, watch the conversation change overnight! I feel compelled to defend the sydcarmy ship, because so much of what people say is Mammification 101, and the platonic soulmate feels like the embodiment the cultural idea imposed on Black women for centuries. I have been that person. It did me so much harm. Never again! (I am bemused that people find it inconceivable that these two hot, passionate, intense people, engaged in the deeply erotic work of feeding those around them and pushing their bodies to their physical limits might want to fuck. ESPECIALLY when they are framed the way they are. It's all extremely romantic and sexual, the more I watch them together under that table the worse it gets)

But on the other hand, I believe, deeply, that western cultures, particularly the heteropatriachal white ones, do not have enough language for all the kinds of love there are, and that it impoverishes us all spiritually. Because I don't believe those acts of love can or should or are restricted to the role of wife or romantic lover. They're defo not in queer frameworks - Alok V Menon writes beautifully about romantic friendship -

'i want a world where friendship is appreciated as a form of romance. i want a world where when people ask if we are seeing anyone we can list the names of all of our best friends and no one will bat an eyelid. i want monuments and holidays and certificates and ceremonies to commemorate friendship. i want a world that doesn't require us to be in a sexual/romantic partnership to be seen as mature (let alone complete). i want a movement that fights for all forms of relationships, not just the sexual ones. i want thousands of songs and movies and poems about the intimacy between friends. i want a world where our worth isn't linked to our desireability, our security to our monogamy, our family to our biology.'

and also -

'Friendship is the most sacred form of love. Home is less a physical location, more a good conversation with a friend. Take me there: the opposite of small talk. Romantic love is fickle and prone to spontaneous combustion. Friendship, it sticks. Keeps my feet on this earth. My head held high. Reminds me why I’m here.'

Donna Haraway speaks very explicitly about the love that exists between people that build something together, how deep and absorbing that can be - and I have felt and experienced that love, built a company with someone who became a friend, held hands as we walked to meetings we were nervous about, shared beds when we couldn't afford more than one hotel room at a conference, noticed we were finishing each others sentences, dressing similarly, building a shared philosophy as we funnelled huge amounts of ourselves into this thing we were building together that meant so much to and for us. There were moments where we were possessive and jealous of one another, we knew each other's families, she saw me at my very, very worst. I think that relationship was deeply loving, deeply intimate, deeply romantic in many ways - she came over once at 3 in the morning to make me mac and cheese. Her fiancee dropped her off! When we stopped working together, it was like a break up, and I grieved it, and there was no space for that grief, because the depth of that love isn't recognised in the society. So much of heteropatriarchy runs on the notion that there is one special person that will fulfill if not all, then at least the vast majority of our needs - but I don't think this is true, I think it's a myth that actively fucks us all over. It makes life cold and terrifying when you're single, and it can trap you in bad relationships if you fear they're going to be the only source of care. I think we can tesselate with one another in limitless ways, and that the exchange can be all sorts of things. There is a version of sydcarmy where their loving exchange is one where they both help each other come to terms with the respective griefs around their mothers, where Sydney supports Carmy in learning how to be a leader with the mental health presentations he has, and he supports her in her journey to a Michelin star, where they both figure out a model more like Kasama's (open 5 days a week for lunch service, 4 days a week for dinner service, with space to have a life), where together they make this massive chunk of their lives pleasurable. It could be one of the most meaningful, transformative relationships of their respective lives - and they can have other romantic and sexual loves outside of that, and it doesn't have to be an envious either or, or an abject extraction of labour. It can be a love of it's own.

that being said.

they should fuck

😉

“platonic soulmate” sounds, to me, an awful lot like doing all the work of being someone’s wife and then not getting all the benefits - someone to hold you when you’re sad or sick or just need a cuddle, someone to do half the chores, someone who makes you feel special, makes you laugh, takes care of you, listens to you and takes your feelings seriously, who takes your side, who puts the time and effort and love in to learn to fuck you just right

i’m not sure how it’s more “feminist” and “pure” to imagine a woman getting a raw deal like that. or why another man or woman (if she’s queer) would put up with her giving all of that wife-y care and time and passion (for minimum 14-16+ hours out of 24, six days a week) and energy away to a “platonic soulmate”

how is that more feminist than a woman wanting and then getting what she wants and all the pleasures and costs that come with it? why is only paying the cost and not getting the full deal inherently purer?

anyway here’s Wonderwall Sappho (translated by Anne Carson)

because I prayed this word: I want

[hourglassfish]

Things like prolonged abuse can give people very uneven social and emotional development. They can be very responsible and “mature for your age” in some areas and also very stunted and immature in others.

This can also happen for, say, LGBT people who were closeted during pivotal periods of development too, where dating and discovering themselves happens later and there can be a development gap for a time. And grief around never getting to be a kid when they were a kid can be a thing for people once they try to connect with the things they had to cut off because they weren’t safe to feel them. I went through some of that myself, from various sources, so I have a lot of empathy for that and how absurd/frustrating it can be.

(And a lot of hope - it doesn’t, as far as I’ve seen and experienced, take someone very long to “catch up” after a while of fumbling around like an idiot)

Anyway - sometimes I see people reading Carmy’s “accidental fuckboi” behavior in terms of how a grown man who’s been dating since he was a teen would be thinking/feeling, if he behaved like that. But – he’s basically being a feckless/inexperienced teenager dating for the first time here, because in this area of his life he is still developmentally a dumb feckless teenager (and one who is trying and failing “not to be shitty” without much of a clue what that looks like).

Doesn’t make the harm less real, but the intent I think is shaped deeply by the fact that, for the first time in his life, he feels safe enough (because of how much responsibility Sydney and Nat are taking on and that is absolutely not fair to them!!) to try to enjoy things. And he thinks maybe he can even make that work with being responsible somehow, but… utterly clueless about how.

There’s the caveat that he didn’t go out and choose to start dating at this pivotal moment for the business - dating found him and there’s complexities around how much he wanted it to find him right here and now and how much he feels obligated to be what his family/friends/Claire wants him to be. I think he’d have been able to turn down anyone who wasn’t as deeply tied to his family as Claire, and I’m not ignoring his agency in the situation, but they chose to bring someone in who he’d find it incredibly difficult to balance pleasing/doing what he’s expected to do by while balancing everything else for a reason.

The “executive function” stuff where he’s staring at the calls coming in and unable to answer either of them is key for me, in terms of this being someone who just isn’t functioning well rn at all and is coming to a real crisis point and trying to ignore that/salve that any way he can think of. Masking really hard and deep in denial and trying to keep a lot of plates spinning without being very intentional about any of it.

It leads to sucky behavior and he’s responsible for that–and the other characters can and should hold him responsible for that, but especially for actually addressing the core gravity warping untreated mental illness that’s motivating a lot of this frantic rushing around and being a prick– but I don’t personally see much of it as a crime of intent. Intent requires a level of insight and experience that he doesn’t have in the area of dating specifically lol

That balance of someone being responsible for their actions but also, for various reasons, in a place that mitigates and shapes what they’re able to do–based on the tools they have–is an interesting part of the story that gets touched on again and again through various characters. It’s interesting and it can coexist with the people around someone having the right to protect their own peace and boundaries.

[hourglassfish]

On Season 1, Episode 7 : Part One : I Expect More: Syd and Carmy's Relationship

So I think this is gonna end up being in a few chunks - I think I want to talk about context leading up to the episode:

I Expect More: Syd and Carmy's relationship,

I know you'll be listening: Marcus, McDonald's and Freedom

Risottogate

Hiring New Fucking Broads: Syd, Richie and conflict;

"That's Not You" The Moment Syd Walks Out

So I'm late on this obvs - and I'm sure the whole world and his dog has already said what needs to be said about this episode, but I wanted to think about it anyway. There's a post on here somewhere that says that episode 7 doesn't have a three act structure, that it captures a moment of stress and tension, and that's it - but this isn't quite how I read it, I believe that it does both. How obvious this is all depends on how you frame it.

There's a central feint to The Bear that I come back to often - that you think 'a stranger comes to town' and that that stranger is the return of Carmy, made strange by his time away. Nah! The stranger is Sydney. The show doesn't really start until she arrives, (we know that Carmy's been in Chicago for two weeks, but our story doesn’t start there. There's a reason for this!) she is a force that is shaking things up and providing dynamism. This is not to say Carmy isn't the protagonist, obvs, nor that he is passive, very much not. But it is often her presence, her drive and determination and belief in Carmy, a belief she is unafraid to unabashedly express, which moves him, and moves everyone around him. When she is around, and Carmy lets himself lean into their connection, he is able to articulate - and action - what he wants, to ‘let it rip’.

I say this in relation to episode 7, cus if your focus is Carmy, then it's one minute in time, a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. But if you focus in on Sydney, it is the story of how she came to quit. Whenever someone is like 'She's a brat! She's arrogant! it was her fault!' - I'm like OK sure - if you want to completely identify with Carmy at his worst, we can do that, and if you want to ignore how the rest of the staff respond to what happens, sure, we can do that too. We can do that. But the show is really clear on the framing of what happens.

So let's begin with the context of where this day comes from.

There is an ambiguity to Carmy and Sydney's working relationship which very much works in his favour. Very much.

In the week that she staged, Syd quickly finds herself as sous, because she has to. The kitchen is not functioning, and Carmy does not have the emotional skills, or at least the emotional bandwidth, to navigate the grief and anger and dysfunction they are all engaged in, to get the kitchen to a place where it can work. There was a reason Kitchen Nightmares made such compelling TV, and it was because behind bad food, ugly decor and terrible profit margins were almost always a bunch of people that were hurting. Carmy may be Gordon Ramsay here, but its Syd who's the hard working, behind the scenes producer, doing the actual graft that pulls it all back together.

She then spent her time away from work essentially formulating a business plan (she proposes first! way before 1:8) to make the restaurant profitable. We know Carmy is bad at this. Richie articulates as much ; 'you've been here two weeks and we've had money problems for two weeks'. Sydney's able to not only see the problems in a week but also suggest practical fixes. This is where they overspend i.e. its the delivery on the flour, not the material itself - and this is how to fix it - Marcus drives to pick it up. Instantly actionable. She has skills from Sheridan that are better suited to running a business like the Beef than the skills and tastes that Carm has from being Chef De Carmy* at Eleven Madison Park or Noma. It will never not be funny to me that she presents this to him in episode 2, and that in episode 3 he says 'I'll dial business, you do everything else' - my guy she has already done it!!! You are not slick!

She's does a lot of the emotional labour of getting the brigade into shape: the shitty, endless nagging, being the bad (or at least annoying) guy over and over again, despite clearly being one of the youngest there, and the newest member of staff. She does this without the authority of being an owner, or a member of the family. I'm gonna try and avoid referring to gender and race explicitly here - like the show does, LOL - but like... it's there. We all know it's there.

We know she is brilliant in a crisis: in Sheridan Carmy tells her they can't afford to lose a single service, so when the electricity goes and the gas goes, she sets up a fucking BBQ from found building materials outside. It's kind of incredible, and they all know and acknowledge it. (Sheridan, Review and The Bear are three different stories of crisis management, and thinking about them that way is really useful)

She is in! 100%. All of her energy and creativity and care and patience have gone into The Bear, it flourishes under the love that is still looking for a home following Sheridan Road’s demise. They are fucking so lucky to have her, and to have her at this specific moment in time.

What exactly does she get back from Carmy for that? There's her wage, of course. She's working well beyond what she's being paid, but you know, it's her job. There's a bunch of stuff we could say about the satisfaction of doing a job well - but that's not what she gets from him.

She supposedly gets a boss that listens to her, she gets to not have some psycho stood behind her pushing and screaming. But this is conditional. He may not scream at her (up until episode 7) but he'll 'cut her down to size' if he needs to - the conversation about stock/jus/demi-glace in episode 3, mentioning that he sought out references and slapping her with a bunch of unanticipated feedback from all her former employers when he essentially wants her to shut up about the risotto/short rib, lots of co-ercive 'are we good chef?' business (straight out of the Donna playbook, I am not, and I cannot emphasise this enough, a fan).

The main thing she gets is to be close to him and learn from him, which we know was really important for her. I think he knows it too. JAW plays it as though he knows she lied about coming to the Beef every Sunday. She’s up front on knowing who he is, so it’s not a stretch to believe that he also knows that she's there for him. She plays her cards close to her chest on all this for a reason: that same admiration has the potential to set up a very specific power dynamic, one where she simply wants to be in the presence of his 'greatness'. ***

That's the exchange, for so, so, so much labour. It's not really equitable, and I think this is a tension throughout the show**, and why I'm never fully on board with sydcarmy stuff, even whilst being able to see the vision. Like... you should be staring at her with adoration, fam, and you should be fucking terrified that she’ll leave! She's carrying a lot of this shit! Carmy knows that, even if you don’t! You don’t make an offer like the one at the end of S1 unless you really want to hold on to that person - be that romantic, platonic, or purely pragmatic (she’s a good worker). In Hands he explicitly tells her that it’s much more work than he can pay her for.

(I'm still quietly horrified by the fact that Syd is deferring her wages for six months... but not getting a profit share? fam. FAM! Looked at through a race and gender lens? In Chicago? It is no coincidence that the people that most explicitly tells her to be cautious are her father and another Black woman)

I want to make sure I've clearly said that none of this is intended as a blistering criticism of Carmy. I feel immense sympathy for him. He is grieving, and having arrived late*****, he has missed much of the communal grieving processes, like funerals, and sorting through people's stuff, that people really need to do together. He's absolutely burnt out and the role he is in requires a skill set he does not yet have (it is poignant that Syd is like ‘why are you buying farmer’s market produce?’ - Tina is right to point out that it’s not Noma, Richie and Michael’s system will have had its strengths). I'm not sure if anyone at The Beef truly knows the extent of his panic/anxiety, nor do I think he is getting treatment. I imagine he must be in flight/fight mode 24 hours a day, which, as anyone who has experienced this knows, feels like you're literally about to die. Always. Always. We are not designed to feel like that for so long.

I don't think he's some machiavellian mastermind extracting her labour from her. I think she is a lifeline and he clings. She offers, and he takes. We know from 2:9 's panic attack, that her seeing him, really, truly, *seeing* him was a deeply meaningful moment for him, that her making the choice to be at the Beef with him before she truly knew him was affirmative and transformative, and her staying, even after watching Richie bully and undermine him, even more so. I rewatched Hands today, and when she hands him the portfolio and tells him he needs help… his little face! Carmy is moving from crisis to crisis, but Syd’s head is just a little bit above the parapet, and she can think differently. He needs that, and no one deserves to feel alone with all the problems he is carrying with The Beef.

That said, I also think he can buy into his own hype, (it’s a good thing, that your sister doesn’t think you’re a genius fam), enjoys when Syd buys into it too and struggles when she does not. This is understandable. The only other person who really understands his success is Pete, who is bottom of the pecking order. He got very successful, very young. He worked hard for that but he also has the expected ego (we’ll return to this!) regardless of the fact that he is a decent guy. Syd is often negotiating this ego. He listens to her, depends on her and needs her, but he also gets to hold her to his unspecific 'higher standard',**** and 'expect more' when they clash or disagree, to wield small mistakes over her like a thunderstorm, to remind her that they both come from a cooking world where abuse is casual and accepted in pursuit of excellence.

This lack of clarity is such a fertile breeding ground for abuse. When you live in a society that is built on abusive dynamics, abuse isn't something that only evil monsters do, it's a clear and constant danger that anyone can slip into at any moment in time. That is why clear, well communicated boundaries are so important.

Everything that happens in episode 7 is a result of this messiness that has been coalescing around The Beef from the start of the series. The ambiguity of this specific dynamic, so central to the restaurant and the show itself, is one of the cornerstones of that.

Carmy can change up the dynamic of their relationship at any moment. He can be her 'mentor' when he wants to cut her down to size, he can be her 'partner' when he needs work from her, he can be a romantic and sensitive 'friend' (that looks like Jeremy Allen White) when he needs her to stay. She can never quite find her feet.

In episode 7, their dynamic changes multiple times. Are they going to be partners that solve this problem together? She tries for that, but she is swiftly, and brutally, ejected from the expo, a role that she has been in pretty much consistently, since the moment she gets the job. The team defers to her, as they've become used to, right up until the moment he screams at her to move. As in Brigade, with the stock, she is being humiliated again.

Will he be her friend, with their connection being the motor for everything else? Ehhhhn, she tries twice to talk about his clear frustration about the risotto review, he is it not having it!

Perhaps he will be her mentor here, who will model best practice in the face of a crisis they deal with together? Well… he certainly models something.

The pre order option being left on is a small mistake. Easily done, a box was ticked or unticked. Small, like leaving a packet of cigarettes near a burner while you scrub the floor, or spilling a bottle of Xanax in a children’s drinks cooler. Much less dangerous too. An easy mistake to make, and the show as a whole is very permissive about mistake making. A huge part of Uncle Jimmy’s narrative role is to make it so that mistakes don’t really stick! The show does not punish fucking up.

Maybe if they had gotten Richie set up on the tablet earlier, they'd have noticed it then. Maybe if Carmy, who was ‘dialling business’ while Syd did everything else had been training Richie, he would have clocked it instead. We’ll never know. What we do know is that there is no perspective around this, Syd’s mistake, and that when the time comes to solve it, both men ignores the skills that they know she has, and dismiss the good faith she should have accrued from months of dedication. Any warmth, respect, gratitude and care that Carmy has had for Syd up until this point dissipates, almost instantly. It's a deeply destabilising moment for the whole kitchen, but for their relationship especially.

It's hard to say much more without referring to the next sections. So...

More next time!

*I know it's Chef De Cuisine, but Chef De Carmy or Carmy De Cusine is more fun to say

**and in a bunch of work places, tbh, where a white male 'genius' is surrounded by a group of POC and women working their arses off while him and his mates dip in and out... OH NO I WENT THERE

*** I think this drives a lot of Carmy's absenteeism as well. It's weird to watch season one post season two, and see how often the team is split, for good and bad reasons. In Hands, Syd and Richie are both doing Carmy's head in, and he jumps at the chance to send them to get caulk. There’s the infamous Al Anon run in Brigade, followed by him sort of lolling about in the office (I know he’s bookkeeping), in Sheridan he does the meat run to Nat/Pete's, in Dogs they're doing the kids bday party, in Ceres for a large chunk of the day he's in the office... it's not the same as his abandoning of Syd with the menu, but you can see how scattered he is from day one, between the demands of the Beef and the demands of his family. I dunno how Michael did it, tbh. Well he couldn't, could he. That's the tragedy.

**** truly cringe to listen to a white man tell a Black woman he holds her to a different standard, as though the world is not already doing that to her. I remain, a sydcarmy safe space but ooooof. I dunno. Like I don’t need or want the Shonda ‘twice as hard, half as much’ speech to be in the show, but the women, especially the WOC, in this show don’t half put up with some shit.

***** convinced this will be a plot point next season, btw. There will be a reason why he wasn’t there and it’ll come up around Marcus’s mom’s funeral, or palliative care.

[hourglassfish]

Fun and Work

I guess I'm gonna use this blog to think about The Bear a little?

So my investment in this show - is heavy. I am really, really rooting for the team of The Bear to build a workplace that they enjoy working in. Not all day everyday, because working under capitalism is always gonna suck a little bit, service work is real hard. And it doesn't have to be forever, cus the nature of many workplaces is that folks move through it. But a place where people can work, and grow, find joy and pleasure and fun in it, earn enough to live with dignity, and for their work environment to also enshrine that dignity. Basic human right. Rare for most of us in the current working landscape.

Anyway.

I find Sydney and Carmy both hugely relatable - and I laughed for about 10 minutes straight when Carmy said that he'd googled fun in Al-Anon. Cus I've done that:

I did not find an ER doctor girlfriend from my childhood, I got an allotment and a cat and I highly recommend both.

But as I get older I cannot deny the pleasure I get from my work, and the joy I find in the people I work with and the connection I have to them - and one of the real sadnesses I feel when I rewatch season two is that Carmy doesn't just bail on the stuff that sucks - money woes and dead raccoons and competing for staff - he also bails on the really fun stuff (and the really fun people) present in his work.

There is the obviously fun 'lol as if this is our job for the day' stuff - literally travelling around CHICAGO and EATING ALL DAY with Sydney. She doesn't just eat - she roots herself, and The Bear in the city, meets other restaurants, gains their support and encouragement, builds community around herself, builds relationships with suppliers that are warm and friendly, picks up on gossip. All the good - and fun - things that you need, cus even in a competitive industry, you've got to have friends. And this Carm's first restaurant. He'd be meeting folks, not as a CDC, but as a fellow executive chef. He misses those words of encouragement and affirmation, the hugs and the light jibes from people who really get it, cus they've done it - the unknown unknowns that are revealed in the random bits of advice people drop.

There is the nerdy fun - the pops of joy we see when Tina unboxes those shiny new pans, picking the art for your walls, stroking the woodgrain on the table that you picked, figuring out the cheapest way to get the silent plates you're craving when the originals are out of budget, learning what your space looks like first thing in the morning, last thing at night - when it rains, when it snows, when the sun is at its highest. Getting a particular piece of kit that is expensive but worth it.

There is the slightly delirious fun - Tina tries for this, when she gently sings 'nduja' at an extremely in the zone Sydney, who is a bit too stressed to be there with her - but if it's not impacting your health, and you're with the right people? Working till the small hours on something you loved - ordering takeaway and snacks to get you through it, psyching each other up and making shitty jokes which you then look back on and laugh about later - these are some of the delights of being in a team, they're building blocks of intimacy.

Related to that is the delight that comes in getting to know people better - and this is where I am saddest for him, because we've seen enough of Carmy's relationships outside of work to know that Sydney was likely the first person to ask him how he felt about retaining the stars. She's a nerd! She loves it, just like him! What other questions would they have asked each other? What else would they have learnt about one another, and themselves from sharing that process? If it hadn't felt so chaotic and weighted with tension, what would it have looked like to have Tina there also, able to learn from them both? I keep referring to her here, because she is, for me, the heart of the show, the absolute best of The Bear (show and restaurant) and a quiet revelation in the second season. To learn that windows become pasta in Sydney's mind, to have Tina straight talking about whether the things in your head are actually being communicated on the plate, to have Marcus asking these endless questions with this kind of quiet joy that disperses out from him?

There is fun and joy and intimacy to be found at work - especially when you are building something tangible and real that you will own, which so few people get to do. When you get to teach people, nurture them, be a part of their development. Especially if you're kind, and sensitive, and you're paying attention. Especially when all the people you work with are united in their love and grief - and by a gift that the person they are grieving for has given them.

Working has maybe not been fun for Carmy historically, I really, really get that but -

(MAYBE. I don't trust Carmy, currently carrying his trauma and his grief, as a reliable narrator - I think maybe work was fun for him for a while, with an underlying sadness around Mikey and home, then he ended up in the wrong kitchen with the wrong chef and had a really terrible time. I am DESPERATE to get a fuller picture of who Carmy was pre New York but still away from home. The Carmy that got those tattoos and made friends with Thom Browne. Like maybe he was shy, Claire. Maybe he *was* But. BUT. Anyway - )

I feel like this could have been the very early, first steps of a shift in that for him. I feel so sad - to see him and Syd laughing in his kitchen and to think he didn't get to have that (you only build your first restaurant once). He also didn't get to have it again in Episode ten, when the shit hit the fan, and Syd And Rich (wow, how far they have come) pulled the team together with a ticking clock, hella yelling/swearing and a shared commitment to a vision. Was it stressful? For sure, I wanted to bust through the screen and get Syd out of there!!! But was it thrilling? Was it the stuff of a glorious anecdote? Were they all sort of exhilarated and grinning at the end? Was it... kind of fun?

Like... isn't chaos kind of fun when you're with a team? When you're safe, and no one's been stabbed, and no one's screaming? We're pack animals. All we ever really want is each other.

Anyway, I dunno what I'm trying to say here. I've been thinking a lot about how with Carmy - and with many folks working through trauma and various anxiety/panic related stuff, the logic is all or nothing. Balance, working with where you are and what you have, being present to what is there, is real hard!