Since the 1960s, the drama of cooking has provided a basis for TV light entertainment, from Fanny Cradock through to Bake Off via The Galloping Gourmet, MasterChef and countless other oven-ready shows. But what it hasn’t done, at least until recently, is produce an actual drama series.
So you wait a lifetime for a restaurant-kitchen-based television drama series, and then, like the proverbial London bus, two arrive almost simultaneously. Technically speaking, the first was Disney+’s Chicago-based The Bear, starring Jeremy Allen White as Carman “Carmy” Berzatto, an award-winning haute-cuisine chef who takes over his dead brother’s neighbourhood sandwich bar.
The first season arrived last summer and the second season was released this June. Following closely behind is BBC1’s Boiling Point, whose first episode airs on 1 October. In fact, Boiling Point, created by former chef Philip Barantini, James Cummings and the actor Stephen Graham, has a good claim to be the real pioneer because it is a spin-off of the 2021 film of the same name (itself an expansion of a 2019 short film), written by Barantini and Cumming and starring Graham.
Both the American and British dramas feed off the tension, timing demands and fraught hierarchies that are common to restaurant kitchens the world over.
Head chef Lorcan Spiteri, 31, who with his brother Fin runs the Studio Kitchen and Caravel restaurants in north London, has spent most of his life in and around the food hospitality business. His parents are the celebrated maître d’ Jon Spiteri, who was one of the founders of St John restaurant, and Melanie Arnold, who used to run Soho’s French House dining room and is a co-founder of the Rochelle Canteen in Shoreditch.
“I didn’t really like The Bear,” Lorcan says. “It was a bit too Americanised. But I absolutely loved Boiling Point, the film. I watched it with my dad, and for us it was like being at work – quite stressful.”
Shot in one continuous take, it featured a head chef, Andy Jones (Graham), in the grip of alcohol and cocaine dependency, a critical visit from an environmental health officer, arguments between kitchen and front-of-house staff, stroppy customers, an allergic reaction requiring an ambulance, and more than enough other incidents to send Graham’s character back to the vodka and white lines.
“Those kinds of things do happen, but they probably wouldn’t happen all on one shift,” Lorcan says. “Still, it’s very realistic.”
Many of the same faces from the film return in the TV series, including Graham, although he’s no longer the head chef or main character. He suffered what appeared to be a heart attack at the end of the film and we see him in the first episode with a livid scar on his chest.
Both The Bear and Boiling Point deal with addiction, an occupational hazard in a world in which alcohol and stimulants to keep you awake have been, if not obligatory, then commonplace.
“When I worked at Quo Vadis it was in Soho so there was a lot of that stuff around,” says Lorcan. “It was work and then go to El Camion until 3am, then to someone’s house and then get back into work at 9am and do it all again. But everyone is a bit calmer these days.”
Lorcan’s father Jon knows that routine all too well. He started out in the restaurant trade in the late 1970s, when he took slimming pills to stay up each night and moved on to speed and later cocaine. In The Bear, it’s Carmy’s dead brother who was an alcoholic, and in Boiling Point it’s Andy – but in both cases the stressful kitchen scenes, in which every morsel of food seems to be marinated in tension, almost drive the audience to drink, let alone the characters.
“You’re so pumped up when you’re working,” says Jon, “that you can’t just go home and go to bed. Booze was around all the time. It was free. You’d pay staff with a drink rather than extra money.”
Now maître d’ at Richard Corrigan’s National Portrait Gallery restaurant, he has been sober for almost two decades and says the industry has cleaned its act up, particularly since the #MeToo movement.
“I know a lot of restaurant staff who are in AA and NA because, well, they’ve had to be,” he says.
In the 1980s and 90s, chefs like the wild-haired Marco Pierre White took on the mantle of rebel or rock star in kitchen culture, with their culinary creations viewed as the product of a volatile kind of artistic genius. The cult of the highly strung performance chef gave a licence to behaviour that wasn’t really in need of any further excuses.
“Back in the day,” says Jon, “I saw a chef cooking and necking vodka straight from the bottle, head chefs screaming and throwing pots and things at other chefs. If you had power, you could do what you wanted with it. ”
Although he says such bad behaviour is no longer tolerated, he thinks the big name chefs of the previous century continue to dominate the restaurant world, and as a result it’s been difficult for younger chefs to make their names.
One exception, he says, is Tomos Parry, who co-owns the critically acclaimed Brat and Mountain restaurants in London. “He’s brilliant, but clean living, married, [has] children, works hard but doesn’t do any of that dark stuff.”
Carmy in The Bear, with his long hair, tattoos and mournful expression, is, aesthetically speaking, something of an heir to the Pierre White and Anthony Bourdain school of attitudinal chefs, except he’s got a sensitive, idealistic side – more singer-songwriter, perhaps, than rock god.
His greatest struggles are with his deceased brother and Richard, the man he calls “cousin” who is, in fact, not his cousin, but nonetheless their relationship suffers from fraternal-like pressures.
Lorcan runs Caravel jointly with his brother Fin, who takes care of the front of house.
“We don’t clash too often,” he says, in contrast to Carmy and Richard. “We’re in it together. When the going gets tough, we stick together.”
His father says the younger generation of staff are remarkably collegiate, diverse and mutually supportive. “The way they speak to each other is so nice,” he says.
In both TV dramas, there is a pronounced emphasis on the need for hierarchy and clarity, with the phrase “yes chef” constantly being reiterated, both as a mark of respect and confirmation of a given order.
“We’ve never been on this ‘yes chef, no chef’ thing,” says Lorcan. “Call me by name. Jeremy Lee, head chef at Quo Vadis, used to call ‘chef’ a ‘dirty four-letter word’. In my experience, the hierarchy is always respected but not enforced by angry shouting. People don’t want to work like that. I wouldn’t want to work like that.”
The word drama originates from the Greek word for action, but another key component is conflict. By their very nature – hungry people wanting good food now! – restaurant kitchens are crucibles of both action and conflict. But it’s almost incidental. Their true aim is resolution: to get that food, in its ideal form, to those paying customers.
For all the drama, intensity and camaraderie, that’s what really draws people to work long hours in a hot kitchen.
“We get a lot of satisfaction out of a smooth service,” says Lorcan, “but it’s when customers come up, as they do most nights, and say: ‘That was a really lovely meal’, that’s what’s really special.”
Of course no one’s going to tune in to watch that kind of exchange. We want the arguments, the accidents, the setbacks, the broken relationships, the drink, the drugs, the pressure, the mistakes, the constant sense that everything is teetering on collapse, all the elements that go into making a good drama but not necessarily, it would appear, a good meal.
