Last we saw “The Bear’s” sad-eyed proprietor, one Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto, he’d discovered loads of cash his brother had squirreled away before taking his own life. And there was a note: “I love you, dude. Let it rip.”
When it premiered last year, the show grabbed audiences by the collar and shouted in our faces and generated all kinds of sweaty, grease-splattered, slice-of-life drama inside a Chicago Italian beef sandwich shop. Now the gang is gutting the old joint to turn it into a fine dining establishment. What could go wrong?
Carmy and Sydney, his partner in all matters culinary, are teaming up with the rest of the kitchen staff to transform the Original Beef of Chicagoland, a longtime neighborhood staple, into something entirely new.
In its first season, “The Bear” proved that original ideas — if treated with care and skill — still have the power to draw sizable audiences, even as industry trends would prefer serving up yet more regurgitated intellectual property instead.
There’s nothing high concept about the series, from creator Christopher Storer and co-showrunner Joanna Calo. It’s defined by its intensity and charm and warmth, despite the clashing personalities within. Anchored by a pair of salt-of-the-earth performances from Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri, “The Bear” is about the stuff of life — mundane, stressful, exhilarating — and all of that remains true in its 10-episode return as the group struggles to figure out, yet again, how to work together and surmount daunting odds and build something.
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Season 2 opens with Carmy (White) and Sydney (Edebiri) watching the sign for the Original Beef of Chicagoland come down. There’s no turning back. They look nervous. With good reason! Would it surprise you that the project descends into utter chaos?
Carmy’s idea of working out a budget amounts to jotting down estimates on an empty pizza box, so his sister Natalie (Abby Elliott, in an expanded role this season) is roped in as project manager. The place will be getting a face-lift. No, scratch that. It needs a total gut remodel once they discover all kinds of problems hidden in the walls and ceilings.
That requires more money — hundreds of thousands more — so they hit up the only person who has that kind of dough and a soft spot for the Berzatto way: Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), whose connections and source of income may or may not have some less-than-savory sources. The show has always been coy about that, except to hint that Jimmy does business the Chicago way. That doesn’t stop Carmy, who makes his earnest pitch: “I love this place. I love this city. I want to start our first business here. I want it to be a real business. An honest business. With honest partners.”
Conservatively, it would take six months to open. Carmy promises to be ready in three. If the business fails, Jimmy is blunt: He’ll sell the place out from under them.
I say “them,” but that only pertains to Carmy and Natalie. This is their family legacy. As the show subtly notes, neither Sydney nor anyone else breaking their backs here — dirtbag extraordinaire Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), recently promoted sous chef Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), the goofball handyman (Matty Matheson) — has an ownership stake. And there’s no discussion of profit-sharing. That begins to dawn on Sydney as she visits various restaurateurs around the city, seeking their advice, while Carmy is off in the wind somewhere. She’s putting a lot on the line and feels like she’s shouldering most of this alone. She’s not wrong.
One of the primary changes this season is to scatter the core ensemble off in separate directions. Carmy is trying to attempt some semblance of a personal life and starts seeing an old flame who is an ER resident. (A chef opening a restaurant and an ER doctor still in her residency might just be the two professions with the least amount of free time to hook up, but details, schmeetails.) That means Carmy is distracted and Sydney is left on her own. She gets a terrific episode where she makes her way through the city and its architectural signposts become inspiration for the kind of food she wants to make. But we don’t see her in meaningful conversation with Carmy about her fears and doubts, despite her prominent role in this venture.
Actually, there are a lot of conversations missing. Carmy and Sydney were burnt out on the gastronomy arms race. Carmy acknowledges this when Sydney asks about the time he was head chef at a restaurant that earned three stars. “The first 10 seconds felt like a sort of panic, because I knew I had to keep them. I had to retain them. Your brain does this weird thing where it just bypasses any sense of joy and just, like, attaches itself to dread.” An anxiety that might be describing the show itself and its initial flush of success.
As a pair, Carmy and Sydney found real fulfillment in making affordable food better at the grimy little sandwich spot. Now they’re just abandoning that? Why? I’d like to hear some of their thought process, because the assumption that fine dining is the apex doesn’t really fly, not after the themes explored in the first season.
One of “The Bear’s” strengths is its fascination with the world of work. Still, when Carmy initially interviewed Sydney for the job, he asked: Why here? She told him: It’s my dad’s favorite spot. We get to meet Sydney’s father this season (played by Chicagoan Robert Townsend) and he’s skeptical about their ambitions, but apparently has no commentary about his favorite Italian beef place disappearing for good.
Carmy has other plans for the rest of the staff. He sends Tina and fellow cook Ebraheim (the stoic Edwin Lee Gibson) to culinary school to sharpen their skills, but the show more or less abandons the latter, who remains enigmatic and underserved by the narrative.
Pastry chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce) learns more about the art of dessert-making during a sojourn to Copenhagen (we see him using tweezers, the very thing Richie used to zing Carmy for!) and there’s a wonderful scene between him and his mentor, played by “Guardian of the Galaxy’s” Will Poulter, as they parcel out dough and quietly share their kitchen origin stories.
Richie, who is going through a midlife crisis, spends a week at an upscale restaurant in town, and it’s a sequence that emulates “The Menu” but somehow misses all of the movie’s satire. The term of art for Richie’s apprenticeship is stage (pronounced stahj) and he emerges a new man. Now he has a purpose! He gets it. Is this believable? Not for a minute. But Moss-Bachrach plays Richie with such abrasive affection that it’s a potent fantasy.
All of this is a build up to The Bear’s opening night — which bookends the show’s memorably frenzied one-take scene from the first season — but before we can get there, we flash back to a Berzatto family Christmas, when the family was still somewhat intact. You can see where Carmy got his taste for chaos and dysfunction: The Fighting Berzattos. Everyone is talking over one another — it’s like a Robert Altman film on coke — and the episode is filled with cameos, with the return of Jon Bernthal and the addition of several other recognizable names.
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The show’s priorities are mostly outside the kitchen in Season 2. That doesn’t always make for a perfectly-balanced story. But “The Bear” remains as absorbing as ever, with a visual language that is in love with food, and in love with the city itself.
“The Bear” Season 2 — 3.5 stars (out of 4)
Where to watch: Hulu
Nina Metz is a Tribune critic