I decide that Ebon Moss-Bachrach is in the 97th percentile for “celebrities with craic” when I ask him how, exactly, he takes his hot dog. “Mustard and sauerkraut—that feels, like, very New York to me. Chicago dogs have mustard, pickles, sport peppers, onions, relish, celery salt, and a tomato? That feels like they need to do the little Coco Chanel thing and remove one thing before you go out.”
He’s speaking to me from a nondescript suite in The Corinthia, rearranged and decorated by an invisible PR’s hand for today’s press junket (neutral curtain backdrop, a vase of hydrangeas). Despite the fact that I’m approximately the 72nd journalist he’s spoken to in as many hours, Moss-Bachrach is what I can only describe as a very good hang, willing to chat about everything from his new crepe pan (“[Every pancake] is like a Rorschach test”) to his obsession with Frank Herbert’s Dune novels (“I was just fully on Arrakis for a while”). He has cookbooks to recommend, too (he’s a fan of the Chez Panisse school: Alice Waters’s The Art of Simple Food, Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat, and Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal), and lets me in on how he ended up posing for Alison Roman’s Sweet Enough, wearing tiny denim-print trunks and holding an Old-Fashioned Strawberry Cake: “Alison’s a friend of mine, and they were doing a photoshoot out on the North Fork of Long Island, and we were down on the beach, and I had a really funny swimsuit on. I bought [it] as a joke to make another friend laugh, and of course it wound up immortalized in this. They swore my face wasn’t gonna be in it; no one was gonna know it was me! And then I don’t know what happened…”
But, of course, it’s The Bear we’re here to talk about—the latest installment of which has frustrated critics. Rather than following the beginning-middle-celebrity-cameos-end template, Season 3 is more akin to a Weezer-heavy ouverture for Part IV of Christopher Storer’s series (which, I’d wager, will be the last). Over the course of 10 Xanax-necessitating episodes, you watch as Carmy morphs, one intrusive thought and stick of “dystopian” butter at a time, into a Nicorette-addicted form of his mentor-stroke-nemesis Chef David, while every other member of The Bear family is unhappy in his or her own way. Syd’s narrative arc consists of opening and closing a Docusign that would make her a partner in the restaurant without ever actually signing it, then saying, “Umm, OK?” while Carmy trades jalapeños for Scotch bonnets. Marcus takes a leaf out of Eleven Madison Dickhead’s notebooks and tries to leapfrog all five stages of grief by making violet gelée. Cicero angsts about the “más queso” he’s invested in the Berzattos’ “popsicle stand” out of guilt over DD’s parenting (or lack thereof). There’s a sense that everyone is treading (hot) water—and while, as a viewer, it’s less satisfying than the “Every day here is the freakin’ Super Bowl!” ethos the show has embraced thus far, it needed to happen.
From the moment that Carmy lists out his 26 workplace negotiables in “Next” (“perfect means perfect,” “details matter,” “focus”), it’s clear that Storer is ready to undermine the “Every Second Counts” mentality that propelled the first 18 episodes of his Emmy-winning series forward. In his hands, the sort of drive that makes anyone plate and trash dozens of Wagyu steaks one after another begins to seem less like hustle, more like trauma displacement tinged with narcissism. And somewhere around the episode Carmy stays up all night making “dusty” Béarnaise foam, the entire cult of fine dining begins to lose its allure, too. The funeral for Ever is sad, yes, but also forces the question: Would you—would anyone—really rather be eating “asparagus with duck egg and potato raviolo, peas, and parm mousse” in a restaurant with “curved privacy walls” over a Tombstone 5 Cheese Pizza? Are you gunning for The Bear’s success, or is there a part of you aligned with the locals shouting, “Yo, fuck this fancy fuck—I want my shit” through Ebra’s window?
It’s Richie—the most reluctant of Carmy’s disciples—who best mirrors the viewer’s dilemma, caught between recognizing that his “Cousin” is, in fact, “a baby replicant who’s not self-actualized” and a desire, post-tête-à-tête with Chef Terry, to create a front-of-house environment “that embraces and encourages razzle-dazzle.” On one level, he’s quietly impressed by the overall micro-radish-ness of The Bear, but also has this response to Nat’s explanation of the Michelin Guide’s origin: “I do not give a flying fuck into a rolling doughnut about the gastronomical proclivities of some dusty French tire-marketing exec. I mean, I’m a Pirelli guy. I have been from way back. I would say that a Goodyear’s probably a more practical choice for Chicago winters. But fucking Michelin… mangia cazzo, no?”
For his part, Moss-Bachrach is relieved to have Richie back as an agent of chaos. “Jeremy [Allen White] and I both like those confrontational scenes… I mean, I try to live my life in a conscientious, sort of polite, civilized way, and take care of the people around me. It’s nice to blow off some steam and just, like, act like I’m the leader of a country or something… [you know], misbehave like a bunch of bad fascists.” He also—like many fans of The Bear—struggled to credit Cousin’s 360-degree transformation in “Forks.” “I biked down to Dumbo, where the show’s cut, to see [that episode pre-release],” he says, but admits to watching it through his fingers because “sometimes I look like a fucking breakfast burrito” on screen. “Afterwards I was sweating, I was [just] relieved it was over.” Like everyone else, he found Richie’s quest to become “a better man” endearing, but he stresses that “it takes more than just putting on a suit” to change a person. “[I’m] glad that the portrayal of this character is not so basic and TV-like that he spends four and a half days at a Michelin-star restaurant and all of a sudden he gets like the Cinderella makeover and he’s somebody else… I don’t buy that shit.”
Nor, it seems, does he buy that Carmy is the catch the internet believes he is. When I ask whether he feels Claire should forgive Carmy post-meltdown, he’s clear: “I would tell Claire to probably distance herself… Like, he has no personal life, and he lives and dies for the restaurant. He doesn’t really seem like boyfriend material to me?”
Storer would seem to agree. If the third season of The Bear has an overarching message, it’s that caring for someone away from the pass is the most important skill you will ever learn, something that Richie, for all his “Bad News” traits, understands much better than Carmy. While “Mr. New York” becomes more and more alienated post-“Friends and Family” (mentally, he never escaped that walk-in full of Heinz mustard and “raddichio”), Richie makes as much progress with his daughter as he does with his “dojo” this season—note the Eras Tour friendship bracelets he’s now wearing with his Hugo Boss suits. That’s not to say that Richard “Little Felon” Jerimovich is a model citizen, of course, but he’s at least on his way to becoming the sort of man Marcus describes in “Legacy”: “[Someone who can say] I kept my chin up, listened, and learned. I did honest work… Fun to be around… And an excellent emergency contact.” It’s the kind of balance that Moss-Bachrach personally aspires to. “I’m not young, really, anymore, so I’ve learned things over time,” he tells me. “My work is deeply important to me, but it’s not as important to me as my family.”
Nor should it be. It’s telling that this season’s best episode might well be “Napkins,” a flashback that shadows an out-of-work Tina as she hunts for jobs across Chicago, only to wind up at The Original Beef, pouring her heart out to Mikey, who promptly hires her. “I don’t need to be inspired,” she insists. “I don’t need to be impassioned. I don’t need to make magic. I don’t need to save the world, you know? I just… I just wanna feed my kid, you know?” Hearing her say it, it seems like the only sane reason to take a job, in a restaurant or otherwise, and you begin to wonder whether being screamed at to “re-fire” agnolotti every other minute is, in fact, worth the “dream weave” of working at The Bear for T—or, indeed, anyone else. Storer is asking us, more directly than ever before, to think about whether Richie’s “system” has been replaced with something even more dysfunctional, even if it is dressed up in a Thom Browne apron. As Moss-Bachrach has it, “Balance is something that, it’s maybe not the sexiest thing, but it is definitely something to strive for.” And by that logic, maybe Syd was right about Carmy all of the way back in Season 1: He’s “an excellent chef,” sure—but “also a piece of shit.”