On beef at The Beef: Conflict, Family and FX’s ‘The Bear’

It is very easy to picture. 

It’s a very sudden change from stillness to motion. Someone gets grappled, for sure. Noise erupts. We hear it reverberate in the small enclosure and then the sounds of objects being knocked about. And now we’re on a hand-held camera! After some seconds of primary action, there might be a shot of a character standing to the side, worriedly hovering with wide eyes and an open mouth as a blurred foreground shows a fist going back for seconds. We cut to a different, more involved character, moving, talking, swearing (everyone is swearing, always) in an attempt to break up whatever is going on. Either Jeremy Allen White’s (“Shameless”) or Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s (“Girls”) too-blue irises pop against the chaos they are often at the center of. It’s all really loud, as I mentioned. Something like “New Noise” by Refused is playing, and if it’s not, it feels like it is because your blood pressure now spikes when you hear that string ostinato, and you know some shit’s about to go down in “The Bear.”

You can picture it because you’ve seen it over and over and over again. And there are variations, too. When I think of conflict in FX’s “The Bear,” I often break it down into two categories: “Kitchen Nightmares” and “Family Matters.” That is to say, they are either extremely intense, lexically creative arguments that happen to occur in a restaurant or emotional friction within a Chicago family that makes the audience grit their teeth and go “ooooh” together all at once. I would give you examples for these but I would need to redirect to two full-length episodes of the show that stand as each example’s independent theses: Season 1, Episode 7 “Review” and Season 2, Episode 6 “Fishes.”

“Review” — the first season’s top-rated episode and also its shortest — is simply described as “a bad day in the kitchen. Tensions rise.” “Review” does not let you breathe for a second of its 20-minute runtime. The dramedy almost drops its portmanteau’s second half entirely as you can only glibly laugh at the aneurysm-inducing situation the staff is in. The episode’s single-take format, maintained for almost the whole episode, puts you in a front-row seat to the catastrophe, having you dab the stress sweat off your brow at every real-time turn. Staff members quit, there’s a stabbing and Carmy (White) loses it. It’s a proper kitchen nightmare.

The source of the nightmare is always exceedingly simple: They have a kitchen problem to solve (here, finding out they have approximately one bajillion orders due when the restaurant opens in 15 minutes). Sometimes, the kitchen problem is exceedingly literal: a low sanitation grade, mold in the ceiling, caulk. I would even argue the entirety of the second season’s plot is one big kitchen nightmare: “Open the goddamned restaurant” is the single goal driving everybody involved. And while these problems, of course, have technical hurdles, like needing a month for the city health inspector to re-evaluate them or failing a fire suppression test, we see these conflicts play out not as logic traps the gang scrambles to solve but as a series of verbal confrontations.

These are all very physical issues; They’re not “Seinfeld”-like hijinks nor miscommunications but generally mundane service work conundrums, so they can’t be talked through. And yet, it feels like the dialogue is instrumental to solving them. “Review’s” 18-minute single take doesn’t focus on the gastronomical skill that leads them to achieve their goal but on the screaming matches happening next to the food being cooked. It’s not their cooking that affects the conflict but conflict that affects the cooking. Our understanding of physical labor’s effect directly relates to the disputes that occur, their resolutions (or lack thereof) corresponding to the issues’ own. The aforementioned consequences of staff changes, the knife incident and Carmen’s behavior aren’t resolved — so neither are the orders. It is not neatly resolved nor do we see it play out, we are simply left in the empty limbo of the unfulfilled.

Family matters work differently. “The Bear” is just a series of kitchen nightmares cobbled together that make it so there’s a new reason to squabble every episode. Family matters lay dormant until you least expect them. On a first watch of the pilot, you miss the flashes of a funeral prayer card when they mix with the overbearing nightmare of overdrafts and payments due. The mystery of Michael “Mikey” Berzatto (Jon Bernthal, “The Wolf of Wall Street”) is shown in subtleties, reflected in how Richie (Moss-Bachrach) tells stories and spouts mean-spirited digs during arguments. His death is treated more as an issue of an unexpected ownership change than that of a family loss. Sugar’s (Abby Elliott, “Odd Mom Out”) conflict with Carmen isn’t part of the blowout fights expected of every episode but a slow and painful journey through the stages of grief told in the margins. In the first season, Sugar mainly shows up when Carmen needs her help with a kitchen issue, and her greater role in the second season only comes from becoming entangled in the business for the first time. Carmen’s psychological turmoil threatens his daily well-being, but we aren’t shown that unless it fits into the anxieties the restaurant creates in him. Richie’s characteristic douchiness and storytelling seem like his own traits until we learn he picked them up as part of a two-person duo, now reduced. 

I can think of two times where the family matter is addressed: the flashback scene in season 1, episode 6 and the entirety of “Fishes.” I’m not going to discuss the massive amount of star power suddenly shoved into a bottle episode about the Berzattos (shoutout Jamie Lee Curtis for her phenomenal work, though), but instead, what it says about conflict in the show. A weaker mind would assume “no restaurant, no problems,” but they would be missing a key detail: Houses come with kitchens! The more serious of the conflicts in the episode arise from the bubbling tension between the Berzatto children (Carmen, Sugar and the enigmatic Mikey) and their mother as they try to mitigate her emotional flux as she makes seven fish-based dishes for their Christmas dinner. Though the previously linked conflict scene does not arise from a kitchen nightmare itself, the way it is abruptly interrupted sure does. 

This is where I had hit a snag. I have been insisting that there’s the family conflict and the kitchen conflict, the business and the sentimental, the overt and repressed. But the word “family” is central to the restaurant and show at all its levels: Cooking is the Berzatto’s way of expression, the two running the show are cousins (bound not by blood but by family nonetheless) and the staff eats a family meal every day. The Beef is the family business, and they make their family conflicts everyone’s business at work — Michael’s addiction causing the business’s decline and Carmen’s new ownership to rise, transferring it to blood family instead of the closest thing The Beef had to a proper boss in Mikey’s final months. It’s ingrained into the walls, a history that sticks to clothes and who is hired. It’s why Fak (Matty Matheson, “It’s Suppertime!”) is at a dinner and Carmen thinks he’ll be happy with the girl from his childhood. It’s a vicious cycle where family is work and work is family.

Sydney (Ayo Edebiri, “Bottoms”), the outsider, gets dragged into it all. She, like every other employee, starts out by taking a sidelining role in arguments over food. In the second season, her involvement in conflict grows from being an underrespected sous-chef to owning a part of Michael’s legacy to becoming family. Simultaneously, those on the family matters side also get slowly kneaded into the restaurant, incorporating Sugar with her new position, Fak as a full-time employee and Cicero (Oliver Platt, “The Three Musketeers) as a stakeholder. Once dormant and hidden, threads of the Berzatto history creep up on the audience, the past unraveling as family becomes irrevocably entrenched with nightmares.

Take the near-constant Carmy-Sydney battles of the second season: As elegantly exemplified by a viral TikTok compilation set to the theme of Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” they are the most mundane, pursed-lips-and-raised-eyebrows, scoffs-and-pointed-inflections, mom-and-dad-are-fighting conflicts the show puts forth. In contrast to the familial arguments of “Fishes” which read like nightmares due to their bombastic nature, these restaurant-centric issues (Carmy didn’t call a contractor, Sydney got blindsided on an architectural decision, the freezer door is broken) are not responded to with the expected screams but with subtle emotional cues: clear but understated hurt, one-on-one discussions without external input. It’s flipping the script; the restaurant’s their baby, so it has become a family matter, even if it revolves around food.

This is why the final confrontation of the second season works so well. It is peak nightmare; a cartoonishly comical issue foreshadowed for episodes, and occurring right on friends and family night, causes everything to go out of whack. In this state, through a comedy of errors, Carmen unwittingly breaks up with his girlfriend-who’s-not-his-girlfriend and subsequently gets into an argument with Richie. The argument should’ve been about the nightmare, about the fact that Carmen didn’t call the repairman in time and that Richie’s also doing fuck all to help right now. But, suddenly, it isn’t. Because it’s about their family, how Richie was there when Carmen wasn’t, how Carmen says Richie’s obsessed with his brother, how they think the other one is a piece of shit. And this all tracks for us because, even though we don’t know the details, we’re up to date; we’ve heard one-sided calls of Richie to his daughter, seen Donna, Carmen’s mother, and her absence, noted the hole Mikey left for the both of them and now we can see how the kitchen as a nightmare is, too, a family matter in its own right.

Conflict is central to any show; it is the raison d’etre, what drives characters. For “The Bear,” it is the piece de resistance. Conflict is normally jumped over as if a hurdle to be dodged and weaved via ingenuity and resolution, agreements and compromises. It is not often the case that the answer is to go through the conflict. It is through toxic verbal vitriol-slinging that the sausage gets made, through extreme pressure that results are obtained and meals delivered. And it feels like every episode is a build-up-to or come-down-from these conflicts, just chugging along until there’s another mountain to be braved by carving right into it. And at first, when it’s just about the food, it’s painful, but it’s easy. But as more context is revealed, as the personal stakes and feelings pile unto the hurdle of “food’s not ready,” lathered in history and dripping with hurt, the more it’s clear that there’s no separation between the two. You can’t have one without the other — can’t have your beef and eat it too. Removing Michael from the balanced equation (system, baby!) of a failing family restaurant forced upon its owner’s child, blocked off from a star-chef son and guided by a non-blood relative makes the careful house of cards topple to reveal nothing but pain and tomato sauce stains.

“The Bear” is a show about rebuilding. It is a show about changing a status quo through gritted teeth and bloody knuckles, about sending off and bringing in, of growing and failing. There’s a reason a show about The Beef is called “The Bear,” why an idealized change, the end state we have yet to see in action, is framed as the titular heart of the series. It is because the show is about conflict, about one singular fight. From day one, the characters have been fighting and fighting and fighting, but they’re not just fighting one another, they’re all trying their damn hardest to defeat the hurdle after hurdle that hits their home and how best to steer the ship won’t seem the same to everyone all the time. But they know they’ll get there. And if it takes bashing each other’s skulls in a couple of times, then so be it. Just look at “Fishes,” how else would they get it done? It’s house rules, after all.

Daily Arts Writer Cecilia Ledezma can be reached at cledezma@umich.edu.

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