From an authentic beef restaurant to Bear restaurant: such stories only happen in the kitchen

The story of "Bear Restaurant" Season 1 can be summarized as a Michelin chef returning to his hometown to take over the family restaurant following his brother's will. My expectations for this series stem from the imagination of a master chef transforming a small restaurant into a new Michelin-starred establishment, similar to the story of a chef in "Ratatouille" who goes from a family food stall to a Michelin-starred molecular gastronomy restaurant. Binge-watching it in a day, both seem to tell stories of generational differences with cooking as the foundation. However, "Bear Restaurant" narrates a story of mourning and restraint, depicting a character who clings to the old era and old relationships.

Losing the "land" and heading to the city. This is a simple summary of protagonist Carmy's Michelin journey, largely due to his brother Micky's refusal to let him work in the family restaurant. But the main story of "Bear Restaurant" revolves around leaving the city and returning to one's roots.

"Cleaning up the mess" is Carmy's answer and the choice beyond selling the restaurant. The authentic beef restaurant Carmy takes over can only roughly sustain itself, and matters like equipment maintenance, debt repayment, and tax settlements exceed the profit capacity of this family restaurant. It can be said that the authentic beef restaurant is a product of the agricultural era's production relations, unrelated to brand, status, or symbolic meaning. Its production lies in providing a guarantee of survival. Alternatively, such a restaurant is like the vast fields outside the town, a point of memory for some people and a place where relationships intersect. The difference between the authentic beef restaurant and the Michelin three-star Noma where Carmy works is that it can attract a girl named Sydney who used to visit with her father every week, rather than culinary school student Sydney seeking gourmet delicacies.

The family-based production relations that labor on the land have already been destroyed by the industrialized kitchen model. The operation of a modern kitchen must be like maintaining a well-oiled machine, where all employees are like its parts, working together to provide the best food and dining experience for customers. This can be described as unified, standardized, precise, and efficient, rather than poetic.

In Episode 2 of Season 1, Carmy recalls his time at Noma, where the chef dismisses a sous chef for producing unsatisfactory dishes. This precisely follows the operational principles of a machine, replacing the faulty parts. Carmy, as a dissenter in the industrial system, previously had expectations for this sous chef to "improve" and "optimize." His chef's uniform is adorned with various tattoos, a touch of ink in the white-dominated atmosphere, but these individuality and humanity are rejected and scorned by the modern kitchen.

In the "messy" authentic beef restaurant, the kitchen is a space where multiple social relationships overlap. Beyond their roles as employees, each person may be cousins, childhood friends, Mexican, Somali, and they all have their own stories outside of the dishes they prepare. It can be said that Noma's modernized kitchen represents clear modern relationships, where work and life exist as two sides of human existence, a working relationship with a sense of boundaries, while the authentic beef restaurant is completely different. Going from a factory back to the land, from a modernized kitchen back to a family workshop, "cleaning up the mess," the disorder in Carmy's life lies in his aimlessness upon returning to the authentic beef restaurant.

"Let It Rip," Micky's catchphrase can be seen as a summary of Carmy's life, and I believe its translation would be "Do good deeds without asking for the path." Becoming a Michelin chef was not Carmy's goal, but rather a title naturally acquired under the drive to make his brother feel proud of him. As for the standard of what is good, Carmy initially set it as a modernized kitchen in the style of Noma, a kitchen model that would be profitable and have good sanitation conditions. Carmy, with the production model he learned from industrialization, attempts to keep a family restaurant alive.

"Rupture" might be the point of resonance between the Chinese audience and the character of Carmy. Under the idyllic imagination of rural life, how does one organize production upon returning to their homeland? After returning to the authentic beef restaurant, Carmy transforms the way of work rather than the people, inheriting the restaurant's long-standing dishes instead of overturning it into a fine dining establishment. His rupture lies in the nostalgia for the familial kitchen relationships despite growing up in a modern industrial kitchen, seeking the imagined warmth of intimate relationships within an efficient work model. In these two production models, the authentic beef restaurant also faces division and choices—Is it a tool for memory, inheritance, or simply a business production tool?

"The Bear Restaurant" shows us the blending of production relationships in kitchen work, which differs from the primarily academically-based production knowledge acquisition in legal and financial dramas. Behind Carmy's rupture lies the coexistence of various relationships in the transmission of culinary skills, including family, mentorship, and academia. Taste, unlike the systematic knowledge transmission of mechanical production or written text through schools, begins with the birth of life and is engraved through growth. Even with the emergence of culinary schools symbolizing industrialization or the advent of information-based transmission through various tutorial videos, most people still acquire cooking skills through family kitchens.

Carmy's mother doesn't appear in the drama, but her taste appears twice. One instance is in the memory of Carmy's siblings gathering, where cooking exhibits a vitality different from industrial products. The memory of taste and the emotional experience can be accumulated and enriched, with the significance of the kitchen attached to it. In the final letter left by his brother Micky in S1E8, there is almost only the taste of a staff meal. In a drama set in a restaurant, "The Bear Restaurant" showcases very few dishes, with each sparingly displayed by the director to provide background information about the characters in the kitchen. The allure of "The Bear Restaurant" lies in its almost complete abandonment of the additional meanings attached to food, such as status, enjoyment, or others. Everything is solely about taste, memory, and connection.