Since its debut in 2022, “The Bear” has received plaudits for its depiction of life in high-stress restaurant kitchens.
The series, whose second season just broke an Emmy record by garnering 23 nominations, has made audiences and critics alike fall in love with the team at its fictional Chicago restaurant. In its third season, which sees Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy working to make his newly-opened fine dining restaurant a success, the focus is on the financials as much as it is on the food.
Carmy is forced to constantly answer questions about his restaurant’s spending, with a new character introduced to audit The Bear’s spending. But just how accurate is the show’s depiction of the business-side of fine dining? CNBC Make It spoke to industry experts to find out.
Nick Anderer, a New York City chef who, like Carmy, came up working under some of the industry’s most skilled chefs before striking out on his own, says that he saw parts of his own experience reflected in the show. He owns and operates Anton’s in the West Village with his wife and business partner Natalie Johnson and is in the process of opening a new restaurant, Leon’s, in Union Square later this year.
“As a chef-owner, I have to think about the numbers constantly,” Anderer tells CNBC Make It. “It definitely is not all about the food. That’s something that’s very hard for a chef to swallow.”
You can’t just think about being an artist. You have to think about being a businessman.
What rings most true to Anderer about this season of “The Bear” is the amount of time the characters spend assessing the costs of the smallest details in the restaurant, from the color of the napkins to the amount of microgreens used during a service.
Seemingly small decisions like these can make or break a restaurant’s razor-thin profit margins.
“It’s death by 1,000 cuts,” he says. “Add up the expensive soap you’re using, the toilet paper, the c-folds, the candles, the linens, the China, glass and silver and the breakage of the China, glass and silver over the course of time, all those little things where no single item seems like it’s too expensive. Over the course of time, if it flips, it destroys your profit margins.”
“You can’t just think about being an artist,” he adds. “You have to think about being a businessman. The sooner you can do that, I think, the better chef you can actually become because you’ve created a sustainable business.”
Kelly Macpherson, the chief technology and supply chain officer at Union Square Hospitality Group, agrees that the show’s representation of a restaurant’s balancing act between the realities of its budget and the goal of its chef feels true to life.
Nick Anderer and Natalie Johnson outside of Anton’s in New York City.
Nick Anderer
“You have to find that balance of the numbers and the bottom line versus what is the true essence of the restaurant and the experience you’re trying to create for your guests,” Macpherson tells Make It. “Every penny matters, but you also have to look at what’s going to make the biggest difference.”
Not everything felt entirely truthful, however. To a chef like Anderer, Jeremy Allen White’s Carmen seems to lack the business acumen that a chef with his level of expertise should have at that point in his career.
“If he’s worked for that many great restaurants and seen them open and close, I feel like he’d be making smarter decisions about throwing endless bits of recipe testing lamb loin in the garbage,” he says. “But maybe that’s part of what the show was trying to convey: He’s caught up in his own artistic journey and not really thinking about the business as a whole.”
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