🔪🍿 The Bear

A series, not a film. A young chef from the top end of fine dining comes home to Chicago to run his late brother's sandwich shop, which is in debt, behind on everything and staffed by people who liked it the way it was. He tries to install a system. The kitchen has opinions.

Started on a Friday in the flat part of July, the evening Jonas Reuter came home early for once. We watched the first two series over nearly three weeks, usually two episodes and then bed, and finished on 6 August.

Emil Reuter says it is accurate and he cannot watch it. He got through twenty minutes, recognised the ticket machine, and went to stand on his balcony. I believe both halves of that review.

Why it worked on me in a month when little did:

• It is about a system being installed in a team that did not ask for one. The brigade, the stations, the calling back of every order. I have run that rollout. Mine had fewer knives.
• The best episode of the first series is close to a single unbroken shot of a service going wrong, about twenty minutes, and I held my breath in my own living room.
• The quiet ones are better than the loud ones. One man spends a week polishing forks in a far better restaurant and comes back standing differently.

It made me want to cook, which is the opposite of what a kitchen in crisis should do. 🪁 Cooking has a line from that week about salting earlier.

What I did not love: everybody shouts, a lot, and the series sometimes mistakes that for depth. A kitchen that loud has a planning problem.

Finished: 6 August

• Series one, the one-shot service. Watch it with nothing else to do.
• Series two, the forks. The best argument for doing a small thing properly since Jiro's egg.
• Series two, the Christmas dinner. Long, crowded and hard to sit through. We paused it once to breathe.