polster wrote:Also, Rick Bayless thinks the show has turned the restaurant industry as a career 20yrs back by showing the ugly side of the business.“If you’re a mother of a teenage boy that’s watching that show and he goes, ‘Mom, I want to work in restaurants,’ would you let him?” Bayless said at the event. “No you wouldn’t. That’s like the worst profession in the world.”
https://chicago.eater.com/2023/6/23/237 ... inion-hulu . . .
ronnie_suburban wrote:polster wrote:Also, Rick Bayless thinks the show has turned the restaurant industry as a career 20yrs back by showing the ugly side of the business.“If you’re a mother of a teenage boy that’s watching that show and he goes, ‘Mom, I want to work in restaurants,’ would you let him?” Bayless said at the event. “No you wouldn’t. That’s like the worst profession in the world.”
https://chicago.eater.com/2023/6/23/237 ... inion-hulu . . .
Other than his unfortunate, ill-advised dalliance with Burger King, I have nothing but mad respect for Rick Bayless but c'mon. No one should be making any life decisions based on a piece of television fiction. Whether the world therein is depicted favorably or negatively, that's not just a sensible or wise basis for decision making.
=R=
NFriday wrote:Mary Berry's Fantastic Feasts is on WTTW right now. She has three different beginner cooks than she did last week. I just watched the Great American Recipe too, and as far as I can see, they still have not eliminated any of the eight contestants. I am sure both of these shows will be shown again on WTTW this week.
mamagotcha wrote:Wow, this darkly comic series just throws you into the deep end of a busy restaurant kitchen. The whole thing is a marvelous love letter to Chicago and food, and especially Chicago food. I've only seen one episode but I feel confident that pretty much everyone in this forum would enjoy it, and I wanted to get it onto your radar right away.
“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). 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. Chicago is in the sweet spot, asking for no explanation, happy to serve as a kind of median city. 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. (“You may well find lovelier lovelies. 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.
NFriday wrote:They just had the finale for the Great American Recipe last night. The top three contestants competed for the grand prize, and the person that won it, I was kind of surprised that he won it. His family is Jewish, but they immigrated from Libya, and I just looked it up, and currently they are no Jews living in Libya. At one point there were 30,000 Jewish people in the country.
NFriday wrote:His family is Jewish, but they immigrated from Libya, and I just looked it up, and currently they are no Jews living in Libya. At one point there were 30,000 Jewish people in the country.
‘The Bear’ Effect: Chicago Restaurants Featured In Show See Traffic Skyrocket
Chefs and owners say the hit FX series has been good for business and great for the city’s reputation as a food town that has it all, from Michelin-star menus to Italian beef.