Evil Ronnie wrote:IMO, "The Bear" is a train wreck...too awful to look at but you keep sneaking peeks anyway.
Sure, the star is eye candy for some...restaurant in transition, but no servers???....$6 Walmart can opener..?.so many other inaccurate details I have to wonder.
Small pieces of bottom round lovingly braised in home size baking pans. Nobody informs the chef we're out of beef at shift's end? Scratch baked rolls in a small/ medium volume outlet? I have to wonder what planet the "technical advisors" are from???
Veal bones used for gravy in a beef joint? BTW, a full 22 qt Cambro holds 44# liquid, so it's perched precariously on top of the shelving?
Sorry, this show is make believe dreck.s
HonestMan wrote:Best new TV show I've seen all year and I watch a lot of TV. Character development, dialogue, flashbacks all work for me as well as a killer musical score. The live Wilco song "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" being played in the background during the stressful 2nd to last episode (someone get me a sharpie that works!) was a masterclass.
JoelF wrote:HonestMan wrote:Best new TV show I've seen all year and I watch a lot of TV. Character development, dialogue, flashbacks all work for me as well as a killer musical score. The live Wilco song "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" being played in the background during the stressful 2nd to last episode (someone get me a sharpie that works!) was a masterclass.
In general, their music cues were all impeccable. They also used Wilco's Impossible Germany which has one of the most haunting guitar solos out there, Andrew Bird's Sisyphus, and a very cool demo version of Sufjan Steven's Chicago. All they needed was some Big Black.
https://www.thetealmango.com/entertainm ... -the-show/
munch wrote:Evil Ronnie wrote:IMO, "The Bear" is a train wreck...too awful to look at but you keep sneaking peeks anyway.
Sure, the star is eye candy for some...restaurant in transition, but no servers???....$6 Walmart can opener..?.so many other inaccurate details I have to wonder.
Small pieces of bottom round lovingly braised in home size baking pans. Nobody informs the chef we're out of beef at shift's end? Scratch baked rolls in a small/ medium volume outlet? I have to wonder what planet the "technical advisors" are from???
Veal bones used for gravy in a beef joint? BTW, a full 22 qt Cambro holds 44# liquid, so it's perched precariously on top of the shelving?
Sorry, this show is make believe dreck.s
"lol, it's fiction so for most viewers the details you mention are completely irrelevant."
I disagree with this statement. Not realistic! Who is bitter now? Completely irrelevant? Sez who?
"They watch for the drama, narrative, humor, etc and don't care or even know about cambros or whatever."
You mean like Lemmings?
"There were many restaurant people involved in the show's inception and production. Half the episodes were produced by Matty Matheson (also plays Fak), the former executive chef at Parts & Labour, which was a pretty popular place in Toronto (not another planet) that closed in 2019. He still runs a few places in the Toronto area and also has a youtube channel with over a million followers. so, he's hardly a newcomer or outsider when it come to restaurants or entertainment."
Should I be impressed? How many people exactly?
""making fictional content means making choices that balance reality with entertainment."
Entertainment?
"Seems unlikely that 'satisfy bitter old chefs' was on the checklist."
Ouch! Who is bitter now?
"If u want bare bones reality, maybe a documentary is more your speed.
Evil Ronnie wrote:More anger from the "expert."
@nytimes.com, Carina Chocano wrote:“The Bear” is compelling not because of how it recreates a kitchen but because it captures something about modern work in general.
@newyorker.com, Helen Rosner wrote:The excellent new FX show “The Bear” takes place in a type of restaurant that only exists in Chicago. Not quite a diner, not quite a deli, not quite a fast-food joint, it is a storefront establishment with big plate-glass windows, grubby in a reassuring way, with illuminated signs that advertise Italian beef or gyros. The color scheme is brown and beige; the diverse, largely blue-collar clientele who line up for lunch every day are a glad-handing politician’s dream; the menus rarely stray from short-order classics and local specialties. I can summon in an instant the sense memory of stepping inside the doors of Johnnie’s Beef or Al’s on Taylor, and the newborn-like heft of a warm, paper-wrapped beef sandwich. (I get mine “sweet and hot, dipped”—both kinds of peppers, plus a full-sandwich dunk in the beefy broth in which the meat has braised for hours.) There’s a smell these restaurants share that’s found in no other place on earth: a layered, rough, masculine perfume of meat and garlic and fryer oil and Formica laminate and sweet, yeasty bread. It’s the aroma that would be pumped into a Smell-O-Vision showing of “The Bear,” which is about a decorated fine-dining chef who returns to Chicago to take over his family’s Italian-beef shop, and to try to save it from disaster.
@newyorker.com, Helen Rosner wrote:“The Bear” has rightly been praised for its uncannily realistic depiction of restaurant life. Kitchen work has rarely been portrayed this convincingly onscreen. The creator of “The Bear,” Christopher Storer, is best known for his documentaries, including the 2013 film “Sense of Urgency,” about the illustrious chef Thomas Keller, and it’s clear that he knows how to capture the way restaurants really work. Little touches help the Beef’s back-of-house rhythms ring true: cooks drinking ice water out of quart containers, a general shortage of working Sharpies, the walk-in fridge used as a place of solitude and recovery, the back office cluttered with bottles of Fernet and Pepto-Bismol, Carmy’s insistence that the green painter’s tape used to label bins and containers always have sharp, scissor-cut edges, never raggedly torn ones. The show was shot in an actual Italian-beef restaurant in Chicago, so the space, and the way that people move around and against one another, feels genuinely functional and claustrophobic. There are a few false notes, by my judgment — can giardiniera, a pickled mix of vegetables, really be whipped up à la minute? Can an Italian-beef joint a few hundred grand in the hole really justify a full-time dedicated pastry cook?—but the over-all impression feels strikingly true to life.
at nytimes.com, Saru Jayaraman wrote:There’s so much in “The Bear” that’s relatable for anyone who has worked in restaurants: small details like the plastic quart tub that Carmy drinks water from; banter with co-workers on smoke breaks; comparing scars from accidents and burns. The show also accurately depicts the relentless pressure that drives some restaurant workers to addiction or injury; the screaming, harassment, toxic masculinity and overwork that they often endure for very little pay; and the pride in their work that brings them back day after day.
After 20 years of organizing restaurant workers to demand higher wages and more equitable working conditions, I watched “The Bear” with some trepidation: It focuses on the struggles of the young white male chef, with only glimpses into the lives of the workers of color in the restaurant. Even so, I found the show to be a strikingly accurate depiction of the joys, challenges and inequities of restaurant life.
at nytimes.com, Rachel Sherman wrote:Last month, Dan Michaels, an owner of Gino’s East of Chicago in Los Angeles, watched as orders for Italian beef — the classic Chicago sandwich of thinly sliced roast beef and tangy giardiniera piled on a roll — suddenly soared to 300 a day, from 150 a day in June.
“The Bear” had struck again.
The cross-talking, anxiety-inducing series from FX about a struggling Chicago beef sandwich shop and its harried kitchen brigade has drawn acclaim from food media and restaurant veterans, propelled a slew of “Yes, Chef!” memes gushing over the lead actor, Jeremy Allen White, and energized a collective lust for sweaty line cooks.
The show has also spurred instant demand for the delectably sloppy Italian beef sandwiches at the center of the plot’s chaos. Search interest on Google, according to Google Trends, nearly doubled after the show was released on Hulu on June 23, and Chicago-style restaurants across the country are feeling the effects in person.
spinynorman99 wrote:The surprisingly good "Street Food" series is back for a third series on Netflix. They're focusing on the US this time (bypassing Chicago). Haven't watched yet but Asia and South America were both really well done.
NFriday wrote:Has anybody else been watching the Great American Recipe on PBS? It was an eight part cooking competition with home chefs. They had the finale this weekend, and there were three finalists competing. The person that won it got congratulated by the other two finalists, and one of the finalists said that he thought she had a chance of winning it, because she put love into all of her recipes. It was so refreshing to see a cooking show where the contestants were hospitable to one another, and hugged somebody when they got eliminated. The judges were super too. They just came out with a cookbook from the show. Hope this helps, Nancy
NFriday wrote:I just found out that ATK's new cooking competition is going to be on freevee which is part of Amazon. I do not know if you have to be a Prime member to see it or not. I think it is going to be shown sometime next winter.
JoelF wrote:NFriday wrote:I just found out that ATK's new cooking competition is going to be on freevee which is part of Amazon. I do not know if you have to be a Prime member to see it or not. I think it is going to be shown sometime next winter.
Freevee is, I think, free to all. It has ads, but not egregiously so.