On the second season of “The Bear,” FX’s breakout restaurant drama, each character gets a moment to shine. But few seize it with quite such abandon as Richie.
As played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Richie spent much of the first season at top volume and vein-popping intensity, perennially there to remind Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) of the chaos in the restaurant’s kitchen, and to add to it. Which makes him an unlikely candidate to train, for a period, at a true fine-dining restaurant, but so he does. Much as Marcus (Lionel Boyce) flies to Copenhagen to apprentice as a high-level pastry chef, so too does Richie “stage” in an upscale Chicago this show hadn’t yet shown us, so that he may learn the essentials of service.
His path is bumpy, but Richie gets the hang of it: A moment of triumph comes when he passes along the information that a table is eager to try Chicago-style deep-dish pizza. A pizza is ordered, and the chef modifies it, cutting the pie into small cylinders, pressing it and adding verdant sauces and microbasil. “Microbasil, fuck yes!,” shouts Richie, a charming moment for a character who’s often abrasive by design. Here, he’s witnessing the sort of thing Carmy’s team hopes, eventually, to do; transforming lowbrow food into a shared experience through the sheer power of belief.
As a critic and a consumer (as it were) of food-related content, I’ve grown a bit allergic to the language of positivity that has lately sprung up around dining culture in shows like “Taste the Nation” — the concept that no matter who we are or where we come from, when we sit around the table, we all come together, and so on. (The 2022 film “The Menu” had its flaws, but it was a nasty little corrective to this impulse, at least.) As a dish, “The Bear’s” second season is fairly well-balanced, but could use, in moments, a touch more acid. Devoting two separate episodes to epiphanic journeys undertaken over the staging process seemed, for instance, less like conscious mirroring within the narrative than like an attempt to reverse-engineer ways, however repetitious, to be sunny and upbeat amidst the stressful restaurant-launch process.
And yet it worked on me. It helps that “Forks,” which takes its name from the implements Richie begins the episode polishing, comes directly after the punishing 66-minute “Fishes.” That episode is a flashback to a family Christmas dinner in which show creator Christopher Storer deploys all his tricks, from stunty casting to zazzy camera work to an everything-all-at-once approach to truly piling on the misery. (It’s like I said: This meal could use some balance.) By the end of that dinner, in which so much of the season’s share of Carmy’s doleful backstory is deployed, one could use some clarity and lightness. Say this much, “Forks” provides.
The scene in which Richie serves the pizza comes as a small, earned reward for a character who’s been through it, and provides intriguing grit and texture, too: Playing the role of a server at the finest restaurant there is, Richie’s slinging pizza and cutting it up with the patrons. Haute cuisine is changing Richie, but, if only in moments, Richie may be doing the reverse, too. Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” — a satisfying deep-dish slice, extra cheese — plays on the soundtrack as Richie undergoes a training montage, having seen just how possible it is to carve out moments of surprise and delight in a rigid format.
This episode does that well — and, I’d argue, substantially better than ones that attempt to break the format. “Fishes,” which preceded it, attempts to, at great length, make the case for what’s dogging its central characters, throwing the Berzatto family’s history of substance abuse and mental illness at the screen in a journey whose overstatement is both the point and, well, still overstatement. Here, we see both the sense of escape Richie feels when finally working in a functional kitchen, finally allowed to use his gift for connection; and we see from what he’s escaping, in a bummer of a phone call with his ex. Sorrow and pleasure exist on the plate together.
It’s a good look for a show defined by its extremes: Season 1, too, featured an episode in which escalating chaos drove Carmy to the brink, just in a restaurant kitchen instead of at home. Sure, Richie has a sense of euphoric bliss as things start coming together for him, but it’s not to last; there’s not a long-term spot for him there, as there never would have been, and he’s headed back to his old wreck of a crew soon enough. The episode ends on a small moment of connection, as he peels mushrooms with a chef (Olivia Colman, nicely understated), who notes that mushrooms do not, strictly speaking, need to be peeled: “It’s just a nice little fun detail so that when the diners see it, they know that someone spent a lot of time on their dish.”
I’d apply the same logic to “The Bear”: It’s easy, in a sense, to make work that goes to extremes. Well, it’s a challenge in that whooshing the camera around and assembling A-list talent and pushing actors into the emotional wilds is a challenge, but it doesn’t take quite as much sensitivity and care. As the conversation continues, Richie, his wild swings of emotion for once tamed, picks up a peeling knife, and the two have a glancing, surprisingly light conversation about how Colman’s character sees her time doing menial cooking tasks as “time well spent,” after an up-and-down career that’s taught her humility and a respect for her own tools. Moments like this, in which two people in the culinary trenches achieve a certain sublimity while their hands are working, are ones of real connection that rely on character, situation and a lightness of touch that “The Bear,” contra its most attention-getting moments, wears well. More of this, please, chef.
