Have the Celebrity Chef Cameos in 'The Bear' Gotten Out of Hand?

If The Bear is known for one thing, it’s the pains it takes to depict reality for professional chefs. The first season of the FX on Hulu original series started with a bang — loud yelling and the clanging of pots and pans paired with gorgeous cooking shots that allowed viewers insight into what it’s like to be a chef. It was a window into what it's like to have a constant desire to bring others joy through food, even when it feels like the kitchen is on fire. And sometimes, it literally is. 

Season 2 did all that and more, taking characters outside of the four walls of their fictional restaurant, The Original Beef of Chicagoland, and into real food institutions. Pastry chef Marcus stages at Noma in Copenhagen (where Malcolm Livingston II, largely cited as the inspiration for his character, was the head pastry chef after stints at Per Se, Le Cirque, and wd~50) and chef de cuisine Sydney drops by Chicago restaurants like Kasama and Publican Quality Meats for menu inspiration. The Bear was delicately blurring the lines between head chef and owner Carmy’s world with the lives of actual restaurant professionals. But in The Bear’s third and most recent season, that was completely erased.

From the very first episode, Season 3 felt to me as if it was bloated with real chef cameos that don’t align with the show’s core message. The Bear has always been about humanizing the chef archetype — one that is either completely godlike or tough and brooding. As Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography author Laurie Woolever wrote in a profile of The Bear showrunner Chris Storer and culinary director Courtney Storer when the siblings were named as 2024 Food & Wine Game Changers, “Chef Carmy, played by Jeremy Allen White, may be a chain-smoking baddie, but he’s also a grieving brother, a prodigal son, a self-lacerating overachiever, and a bewildered product of chaos and dysfunction.”

Through a growing canon of cooking shows that feature a rolodex of personalities and glamorous food documentaries like Chef’s Table, not to mention the timeless value of culinary accolades like the James Beard Awards, Michelin stars and awards, The World's 50 Best, and even Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs lists (Carmy himself earned the title of Best New Chef in an unspecified year), the most famous chefs have become powerful icons and revered as creative geniuses. But with that fame can come the pressure to maintain that icon status and sometimes an unhealthy power dynamic between the chef and the rest of their team who are tasked with executing that vision and maintaining day-to-day operations. 

We begin to see this exact issue unfold in Season 3, when Carmy screams at his team throughout service and overlooks Sydney’s contribution to the restaurant’s menu in favor of his own personal pursuit of external accolades. He scraps most of the menu that Sydney had designed and executed during Season 2’s friends and family meal, ignores her new ideas during the daily research and development process (when she suggests cavatelli and hamachi, he decides on raviolo and kampachi). When Sydney calls him out for it in Episode 9, saying, “It’s hard to keep up with you sometimes,” Carmy is incapable of apologizing. Carmy is so in his own head — so stressed about building a legacy — that he loses sight of how he’s damaging the people around him.

So it’s confusing that a show that cares so much about examining this issue — how the desire for accolades, media recognition, and stardom can cause a great toll on a chef and their restaurant — spends so much of its screen time on celebrity chefs. The first episode of the current season features cameos from 1988 F&W Best New Chef Daniel Boulud and world-renowned Danish chef René Redzepi and in both of Carmy's flashbacks to his time at their restaurants, we learn nothing more about the person behind the persona. For anyone who watches food television regularly or stays updated on restaurant news, those chefs are huge names. But I have to assume that the average viewer — one who is maybe learning about the hospitality industry for the first time through the lens of The Bear — might think they’re simply actors. 

Boulud teaches Carmy how to prepare one of his most famous dishes, while Redzepi gives Carmy a nod across the room. Same goes for the opening scene in the Episode 3 finale, where 1988 F&W Best New Chef Thomas Keller instructs Carmy on how to truss a chicken and provides some career advice: “Come in every single day and just try to do a little better than the day before.” 

There’s certainly intention behind these scenes; they're meant to show viewers more about Carmy’s background and the chefs who have influenced him along the way. But if we, as flies on the wall at The Original Beef and The Bear, are learning the good, the bad, and the ugly of Carmy's psyche, wouldn’t Carmy have walked away from his past restaurants with a more holistic perspective? Instead, I felt like the cameos were nothing more than bland celebrity sightings, as if to say, “How lucky was Carmy to have been blessed by their presences?”

Don’t get me wrong, Boulud, Redzepi, and Keller are all immensely talented and they deserve every crumb of success they have received. There are also many places to learn more about the complex minds behind these three chefs, like Daniel Boulud’s memoir, Letters to a Young Chef, the 2016 documentary about Noma, Ants on a Shrimp, and the 2013 documentary, Sense of Urgency on The French Laundry (which was actually directed by Chris Storer himself). 

But in The Bear, a show that prioritizes character depth and nuance, these “human” chefs seem nowhere near as human as Carmy, Sydney, and even Olivia Coleman’s character, the fictional chef of Ever, Andrea Terry. In the few scenes we get with Terry, we learn that she had a deep love for her team at Ever, that she values the people even more than the food, and that, she, in her own words, “wants to sleep more, go to London more, and go to a party and meet people.”

 I think it’s frustrating for many reasons that the only real big-name chefs who were shown to mentor Carmy were white men, and the only woman had to be invented, even if she’s written excellently. It’s even more frustrating that the only other fictional character who trained Carmy is practically a supervillain. Although Joel McHale does a fantastic job portraying David Fields, a chef who verbally and psychologically abused Carmy in his kitchen, his character is a complete cartoon. 

Fields is everything awful about working in the restaurant industry, thrown together into one character. He whispers demoralizing insults to Carmy as he plates precise dishes, puts down his ingredient and techniques ideas, repeatedly tells him that he will never be successful, and does it all in a menacing whisper. There are mean, horrible, toxic chefs out there, but even they are human. When you put McHale’s character, and the real chefs who are featured in The Bear side-by-side, it seems as if there are only two types of successful chefs: “good chef” and “bad chef.” In reality, most chefs fall somewhere in between. Just like Carmy.

In Episode 10, “Funeral,” the chef cameos have more meat to them. During a dinner memorializing the closure of the fictionalized version of Ever, real-life chefs and restaurateurs like Christina Tosi, her husband and Season 3 co-producer Will Guidara, 2022 F&W Best New Chef Genie Kwon, and even the real Malcolm Livingston II attend and commiserate on their shared experiences. The scene itself was mostly unscripted; the chefs naturally talked about the first dish they created for a restaurant menu, the impact of having a bad boss, and the joy of cooking. Every word added depth to the public perception of these real, ultra successful chefs who viewers may or may not recognize. And yet, I felt like the scene was far too long, swallowing up the entire episode and one too many storylines unresolved (is Sydney going to quit The Bear or not?!). 

In the end of Season 3, the sheer amount of chef cameos feel to me more self-serving than intentional. The Bear was already well in the culinary zeitgeist without the insertion of celebrity hospitality professionals. The third season was satisfying enough, but it left me craving more development from the recurring characters and more time spent in The Bear’s kitchen. I want to see more of Marcus progressing his pastry prowess. More of Richie finding creative ways to surprise and delight the guests. More of Sydney in general. More of watching someone’s entire perception of life change after eating a really good Italian beef sandwich. Instead, I got a plate full of cold cameos.