There’s a scene in the TV kitchen drama The Bear where one character confronts the head chef: “You’re an excellent chef. You are also a piece of shit.” You can guess the type of guy she’s talking about — tattooed and testosteroned, pursuing culinary greatness and pursued by his demons.
The cliché of the maverick chef is now as familiar as the maverick detective. It is invigorated by the memory of Anthony Bourdain, described in the journalist Charles Leerhsen’s new tell-all biography as “a crash test dummy extraordinaire”.
Thankfully, The Bear is too clever just to live off an archetype. Yes, the show’s fictional protagonist, Carmen, is troubled but brilliant (one of Food & Wine magazine’s best new chefs, we’re told). He has inherited a chaotic Chicago beef sandwich restaurant from his brother, who took his own life months earlier.
But Carmen has come to bury Gordon Ramsay-style antics, not perpetuate them. His CV includes the famed French Laundry. An atrocious head chef whispered in his ear: “You should be dead.” He threw up every morning before work. In Chicago, he promises his team of misfits that he’ll make their dysfunctional restaurant respectable. Carmen is not into Bourdain excess; he attends AA meetings. Sadly, his path to professional sobriety is torturous.
The Bear, which is rightly critically acclaimed for its realism, raises the question that many of us who love restaurants forget to ask. Why is something that we see as so simple and pleasurable — the act of eating at a restaurant — the apparent cause of so much complication and suffering? Other workplaces, from banks to book festivals, have had their reckonings with bullying and stress. Do restaurants, and kitchens in particular, have to be different?
Auguste Escoffier wanted to be a sculptor, but he was sent to work in his uncle’s restaurant at the age of 13. He settled for trying to elevate chefs from the ranks of domestic servants to the noble order of artists. As he points out in his memoir, “if the Marquis de Béchamel had not invented his divine sauce, he would long ago have been forgotten”.
Escoffier is best remembered as the author of Le Guide Culinaire, published in 1903 and still the bible of French cuisine. But he also tried to turn the page on the abusive kitchens that he had grown up in. In The Bear, Escoffier’s ideas are at the heart of the new culture. “We are going to start operating like a French kitchen,” Carmen announces.
Escoffier’s idea was a form of Taylorist specialisation. In his “brigades” — he had served as an army chef during the Franco-Prussian war — the chefs were divided into teams who could carry out their tasks in parallel.
Shouting and raging was not Escoffier’s style, according to his biographer Kenneth James. He banned alcohol in the kitchen, and resented customers who smoked in the dining room — having what he called “dinner à la nicotine”. He was sympathetic to socialist ideas, particularly pensions for retired staff.
Escoffier, in other words, did not see the art of cooking and the bad-boy antics as a natural pairing. But his recipes were followed more faithfully than his ethos. Escoffier-loving chefs such as Marco Pierre White bawled out their underlings. Kitchens have been notoriously unpleasant.
“If you put anyone from an office into a kitchen, I don’t think they’d survive,” says Poppy O’Toole, an English chef who trained in a Michelin-starred restaurant in Birmingham. “It is like a family — a very unhinged family.” O’Toole was often expected to work 70 hours a week, and subjected to sexist comments. (Women make up 28 per cent of UK chefs, up from 20 per cent pre-pandemic.) “There were unwritten rules: you can’t ask for holiday, you can’t ask to leave early, if you’re unsure you can’t ask [for instruction]. Otherwise you’d get ridiculed,” she recalls.
But bad practice was not universal. “I’ve worked in kitchens ruled by fear and kitchens ruled by encouragement,” says O’Toole. The latter approach works better. For it to prevail, more young chefs need to speak up, she says.
Since lockdown, she has left restaurants and now publishes cooking videos online, amassing millions of fans. She is happier. “We have the image [of the rock-star chef on the brink] and we think it’s cool. But is it cool?”
It’s obvious why kitchens might be stressful: too little space, too little time, too much heat. The staff care about doing things right. The head chef’s mind is full of rotas, suppliers, waiters, customers, bills.
I spent some hours this week observing the kitchens of two Islington eateries: Kipferl, an Austrian restaurant just off Upper Street, and Westerns Laundry, a modern European place near the Arsenal football stadium. Every chef and server I spoke to said that they had worked in at least one awful kitchen. Every one insisted that this old style was not necessary. Owners don’t want the bad vibes. More younger chefs don’t see the point in shouting.
Dice the potatoes wrong, and it’s OK, they can be made into soup. Start a fight because someone touched your knives and you no longer last long. “If someone screws up the meat, I’m not going to do anything about it. Just explain,” shrugged Damian, head chef at Kipferl. (He admitted this hadn’t always been his approach.)
“The troubled chef thing — it’s a bit of a bullshit excuse for being horrible to people,” said Jack Williams, the 32-year-old head chef at Westerns Laundry. Williams had enjoyed The Bear, but thought it lacked action: “It’s just a lot of people standing around doing nothing, and there isn’t time to do nothing in a kitchen.”
The kitchens of Kipferl and Westerns Laundry were kinetic. But they were not explosive. The spooning of sauces, the slicing of onglet, the wiping clean of plates and mistakes — it seemed to happen with smiles or silence.
Staff shortages have shifted the power. When Williams was a young chef, if you couldn’t stand the pressure, you got out of the kitchen — there were 20 people ready to replace you. Brexit and Covid-19 changed the equation. “So many people after lockdown were just like: ‘I don’t want to work in a kitchen again.’ There’s not 20 other people who want that job now.”
Restaurants have to pay more. They have to offer their staff lives outside the restaurant. Work/life balance makes people better chefs, Williams said. “We still lose people because of the hours, but not because of the kitchen environment.” (In some places, however, lack of staff has increased the stress for those who remain.)
In recent years, food has become something to look at — a trend epitomised by the sunglass-wearing salt scatterer, who is too ridiculous to name here. The Bear puts the focus back on the production line. It validates itself with its kitchen dialect: “Hands!”, “Backs!”, “Yes, chef.” But Carmen’s lesson is not that you have to be a tortured genius to run a kitchen. No, his lesson is that the restaurant business is so hard it probably helps if you aren’t.
On the day I was at Kipferl, three pastry chefs had to turn out 40 cakes. They whirled their arms in and out of huge bowls. They were stressed, but distinctly unshouty. “If you are in a bad mood, you won’t make good cakes,” said one. “The chocolate feels it.” She was only half-joking. I guessed she was an excellent chef, no expletive caveat required.
Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer. ‘The Bear’ is on Disney Plus
All photographs for the FT by Harry Mitchell
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