Food! Angst! Chaos!
Let’s get this review started, 3.5 chefs.
There is a lot going on in this show, so I’ll begin with the premise. Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto” (Jeremy Allen White) has spent years working as a high-level chef at some of the best restaurants in the world, but when his older, alcoholic brother Michael (Jon Bernthal) commits suicide, Carmy trades glamor for grease when he returns home to Chicago to run the family business Michael left behind – a dirty old dive of a sandwich shop called the Original Beef.
OK, BUT WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Your guess is as good as mine. In many ways, it’s like your own personal Rorshach test and what you see isn’t necessarily wrong. My initial thought is it’s about the dark side of the American dream. For many, business ownership is seen as the pinnacle of success, true freedom, the ability to know that money will come in yet if you want a day off, you can have it. While you’ll never have to worry about answering to a sucky boss, you’ll damn near answer to everything else. If something breaks, you’ll fix it. If a bill is overdue, you’ll pay it. If a government inspector wants a word, you’re the one getting an earful. When profits run short, you’ll go without pay to keep your staff in the black. And when disaster strikes, you’re the one up all night, picking up the pieces.
Carmy exemplifies this lifestyle as the living embodiment of a walking, talking human panic attack. The poor kid says very little or does very little outside of work and constantly looks like his head is about to explode. If owning your own business is supposed to be fun, someone needs to remind him.
Maybe it’s about family, or how the people we love drive us nuts, and that insanity can be magnified times a million when money is involved. Petty rivalries, jealousies and infighting abound as Carmy deals with Cousin Richie (Ebon Moss Bachrach) and sister Sugar (Abby Elliott.) (An SNL alum, Elliott really shines here.)
At the start of season 1, Richie is miffed that Michael didn’t leave the joint to him and undermines Carmy at every turn, while Sugar sees the shop as an insufferable money pit/giant ball of stress that should be sold and forgotten posthaste. Carmy knows he’s better than this greasy spoon, but he just can’t bring himself to let this place, wrapped up with so many family memories, go.
Maybe it’s a show about perfection, about being the best at something and all the time and stress that goes into being the best at a trade. You may not know it but the chefs behind the scenes at your favorite restaurant really do toil away to bring you exquisite dishes in a timely manner and make it look so easy you probably never thought about all the skill that goes into it. Here, we get a constant look at this labor of love, kitchen workers hustling about putting the finishing touches on their masterpieces.
At the start of the show, Carmy wants to turn the Beef into something better. He’s well versed in French kitchen style – the ranks and customs and so on – militaristic rituals that turn cuisine into a science and get food ingredients out of the fridge, into the fryer, onto your plate and into your mouth in record time without you ever knowing about any of the fuss that went into it. Speed. Timing. Precision. Respect. Calling each other Chef. And dang it, keeping the kitchen clean.
But the Beef crew are more or less fast food minimum wage schmucks at the start of the show. With the help of his right hand woman/sous chef Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri), a fellow culinary school grad, Carmy whips the crew into shape in an arc similar to any down on their luck sports team movie. You know the movies I’m talking about. First they’re idiots who think trying is for chumps but when they try, they start to win and they start to like it so they try harder and win more?
Chaos is the name of the game. Episodes are loud, obnoxious, fast paced, and crazy, all meant to mimic the frenzied pace of a busy kitchen. It’s hard to keep track of what’s happening when the characters are screaming at each other while having secondary and tertiary side arguments with others. Richie is the loudest and most obnoxious of them all and one wonders when someone will just knock him the eff out but he eventually redeems himself and grows on you.
Season 2 changes things up a bit as Carmy closes the Beef and goes on a quest to reopen it as the Bear – a fine dining restaurant “bearing” his family nickname. Apparently, the show became very popular between last year and this year because it’s a star studded cameo fest this year- Jamie Lee Curtis, John Mulaney, Bob Odenkirk, Sarah Paulson, Olivia Colman, just to name a few.
Yes, to be the best, you really have to put in the time. Morning. Noon. Night. No time for a life. No time for love. No time for hobbies. No time for fun. No time for anything. Our intrepid food slingers often wonder whether or not it is worth it but then again, they love food so much they can’t imagine doing anything else. Further complicating matters, they love each other, but drive each other insane.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. With so many cooking shows like Gordon Ramsey’s Hell’s Kitchen gaining popularity, it was only a matter of time before someone figured out away to dramatize food production, raise the stakes, and make us realize that behind every cheeseburger we scarf, there’s some poor bastard of a restauranteur sweating it out over whether he’ll be able to keep the lights on for another month. It’s almost enough to make you want to go on a diet, and you should, because let’s face it, we’re all fat.
Watch on Hulu.
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