#Bear writer return note link tv#

Luca replies that after working with a superior cook, he realized he wasn’t the best and wasn’t ever going to be the best. Marcus receives his own lesson about ambition when he asks Luca, the chef he’s studying under, how he got so good.

Her offhand summary of its lessons is a little dismissive, but Marcus, a former athlete, gets it: The team “kept drilling,” he says, grinding slowly toward excellence. She has been reading “Leading With the Heart,” a book by the former Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski - a gift from her father. In another second-season scene, Sydney has a video chat with the pastry chef Marcus, who has gone to Copenhagen to hone his skills. Chicago is in the sweet spot, asking for no explanation.

It continually suggests that once you abandon the ladder-climbing it associates with the coasts, ambition can be more about playing the game on your own terms or not playing it at all - pursuing your ambition without the brutal expense or atomizing ultracompetitiveness of places closer to the cultural spotlight. The show casts the city’s restaurant culture as sophisticated but warm, human. When Sydney, planning for the new business, visits other restaurants seeking guidance, she finds people glad to assist at the well-regarded eatery Avec, she gets crucial advice from the real-life restaurateur Donnie Madia, playing himself. This is the kind of chef we see Carmy transforming into, and the kind of chef we’re shown surrounding him. “New York,” here, signifies a heightened awareness of status and image, stress and precarity, ruthlessness dressed as sophistication.Īnd Chicago, for “The Bear,” is depicted - accurately - as a place where the goal is not necessarily to win status or acclaim so much as to create something great and original, ambitious without pretense, committed to excellence for its own sake rather than prestige or fame. But he goes on to talk about having earned Michelin stars, saying that his brain raced right past the joy of it to dread - that it felt imperative to keep them at all costs. But it looks sick, and I bet it felt really good wearing it.” It did, Carmy acknowledges nobody here is going to deny New York’s cultural domination. In one scene in the second season, Sydney Adamu, the woman who is now chef de cuisine for the new restaurant Carmy hopes to start, is discussing the menu with him when she notices his old chef’s uniform from New York, embroidered with his initials. But “The Bear” captures something real about the city’s dining culture - and, more broadly, what you might call the geography of ambition. Leave it to a Chicagoan like me to note that there are, in fact, more than 20 restaurants in the city with at least one Michelin star.

Their ambitions revolve around the excellence of the work itself. But never a lovely so real.”) The sort of place a restless, plucky Midwesterner like Carmy would leave in order to pursue his ambitions, hoping to prove something to everyone back home - and the sort of place he would return to, stoic and remote, to dole out unglamorous sandwiches from a broken-nosed kind of shop. Insofar as it does have a national reputation, it is as an unpretentious workhorse of a place: the “City of the Big Shoulders,” the city Nelson Algren compared to loving a woman with a broken nose. Chicago is in the sweet spot, asking for no explanation, happy to serve as a kind of median city.

Some of network television’s most popular procedural shows are set here - “Chicago Med,” “Chicago Fire,” “Chicago P.D.” - but like so many Chicago stories on TV, they use the city for its unmarked, adaptable qualities: It is a metropolis big enough to accommodate any type of person or story, big enough that viewers do not expect to be offered quaint local color, and yet not culturally defined in the American mind in the ways New York City and Los Angeles are.

#Bear writer return note link tv#

“The Bear” is among relatively few TV shows that truly lean into a Chicago setting: In addition to copious shots of elevated trains and city skylines, there are nods to local culture hallmarks ranging from the obvious (Scottie Pippen, Bill Murray, Vienna Beef hot dogs) to the deeper cuts (Harold Ramis, Pequod’s Pizza, Margie’s Candies).