Close Read: The Bear's Trip To Copenhagen

It’s the series’ best (ever?) episode

I am so sorry but not one single celebrity did anything interesting this week except for Nicki Minaj saying she has a Republican doctor. So this is what I had planned for Tuesday: Spoilers for season two of The Bear below.

Photo: Screenshot.

There’s a line from Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight press tour that I think about a lot: “Until Moonlight I had never seen one black man cook for another on screen,” the director told the Financial Times in 2017. “But I wanted the characters to be free of ‘groundbreaking’ or ‘never before.’ We were ascribed those things. They weren’t the point.” Moonlight’s diner scene, where we watch one man make a plate of food for another, is so lovingly and artfully rendered. It says everything those two characters can’t: In this small way, let me care for you. It’s so practical, so plain, and before I read that quote, I hadn’t realized I never saw it onscreen either.

I kept thinking of that quote during the fourth episode of The Bear’s second season. In the run up to the restaurant’s grand opening, Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) send their staff of chefs on various training adventures. Tina goes to culinary school, Richie (Desi from Girls, real name Ebon Moss-Bachrach, but realer name Desi From Girls) stages at a fancy Michelin star restaurant. Marcus (Lionel Boyce), the restaurant’s baker-turned-pastry chef is sent to Copenhagen. It’s practice and pilgrimage: study under a pastry chef there, come back with new ideas for the Bear menu’s desserts, and, privately, get a little break from being his mother’s caregiver. 

The story’s parameters are so gentle: Marcus wanders around Copenhagen, tries the city’s treats, tends to the plants and (maybe nonexistent) cat on the houseboat where he’s crashing. He jots down notes in his notebook; he calls home. (Meanwhile, in The Bear’s kitchen, everything is always collapsing and shattering, or somehow on the brink.) Marcus studies Luca (Will Poulter), the chef he’s shadowing. Marcus watches the seasoned chef slice, shape, blend, fold, and you can see the corners of his own imagination expanding. From the beginning, Marcus’s charm has been his patience and openness; it’s his gift as a chef, too.

Luca is firm but not impatient. He is skilled and efficient, and only asks the same of Marcus. He gives brief, direct feedback. In “Forks,” at the nice restaurant, Desi wanted to be impressive. Marcus wants to work beside Luca, to see what else there is to create. (Poulter is great here, open but not desperate, politely unknowable. A good self-tape for the role of Taylor Swift’s next boyfriend if Tree Paine is watching.)

The second season of The Bear, more than the first, finds everyone trying to achieve some sort of balance. Can Carmy be a chef and also a