The Bear serves up a sweet nod to print journalism

Winnipeg Free Press

3 days ago

Opinion
This column is about the latest season of The Bear, minor spoilers within.
At the end of Season 3 of The Bear — the FX dramedy about the titular Chicago restaurant and its tortured chef Carmen (Carmy) Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) — there's delightful, unexpected anachronism for a show set in 2025.
The gang at the Bear are waiting, with bated breath, for their review in the Chicago Tribune.
FX/TNS
Jeremy Allen White is back as chef Carmen (Carmy) Berzatto in Season 4 of The Bear.
The Trib write-up provides the season-finale cliffhanger setting up Season 4, which dropped last week on Disney+. We learn in the first episode of the new season that the review wasn't exactly a full-on pan, but it was far from a rave — and it casts doubt on the future of the restaurant.
As someone who has written many reviews in her time as a print gal, seeing a newspaper review being treated as something to be anticipated — something with weight and influence, something with legitimacy — filled me with joy.
Some critics have argued the inclusion of the review is meta commentary from creator, co-showrunner, writer and director Christopher Storer since, obviously, The Bear has been the subject of many TV reviews. Perhaps. But many of us remember a time when a newspaper review — not an Instagram post, not a tweet — of a restaurant could make or break an establishment.
Watching, I kept thinking about the late, great Free Press restaurant critic Marion Warhaft, for whom I had the honour of writing an obituary earlier this year.
Warhaft was tough but fair, and was gifted with adjectives — flannelly mussels! — but what made her such a trusted voice is the fact that she knew who she was writing for: the reader, not the restaurant. Warhaft was among the last anonymous restaurant critics; she wasn't a 'don't you know who I am' diva. She wanted her dining experience to be how yours might be.
With local newspapers shuttering and newsrooms shrinking and resources becoming more scant, reviews are often the first things to be cut. But they are journalism. They are a record of our life at the time.
You may recall Marilyn Hagerty, the now-99-year-old Grand Forks Herald restaurant critic and columnist who went viral in 2012 for a positive review she wrote of the Olive Garden. People were quick to snark on her no-frills, reported-style reviewing of a chain restaurant — 'The chicken Alfredo ($10.95) was warm and comforting on a cold day. The portion was generous. My server was ready with Parmesan cheese' — until Anthony Bourdain set them straight.
'Marilyn Hagerty's years of reviews to be a history of dining in America too few of us from the coasts have seen,' he tweeted. 'We need to see.'
Like the news, that gap has been filled by social media influencers — often invited by the restaurant. They are not there to critique the food or the experience, mind you. They are there to create content about it. In their short TikToks and Reels they might actually include a shot of them actually eating the food, and it's always 'so good.' But is it?
Or the food is completely secondary, as in mukbangs — a Korean trend gone global that translates to 'eating broadcast' — in which a host eats a large quantity of (usually fast) food while having a chat with the audience to the delight of those who love ASMR and to the horror of those for whom audible slurping is a punishable offence.
It's not just capital-I Influencers. There's a reason artful shots of latte art and avocado toast on a vintage plate became millennial esthetic clichés; many of us became documentarians, capturing dining experiences for consumption by other people. And just like our taste in music and clothes and movies, our taste in food can communicate something about who we are and what we value. (It's best, of course, if one's not trying too hard. New York-based cookbook author Alison Roman has the coolest Instagram I've ever seen and it's just, like, insouciant photos of dill.)
This phenomenon is curiously absent from The Bear. There are no influencers in the dining room; I don't recall ever seeing a background extra playing a patron hold an iPhone over a dish while their date impatiently waits to dig in. There isn't a frenetic montage of The Bear going viral on social media, just a brief mention of a scallop dish playing well.
Instead, the staff are worried about coverage in the paper of record — and they refer to it as such — and excited about a magazine spread in Food & Wine.
We read user reviews online all the time, often on products we're thinking of buying. Many of these reviews are useful, many are not. But there's something about building trust with a name you recognize, a source you can return to get perspective you value — whether you agree or not.
Restaurants are a lot like newspapers in that they are often chaotic, deadline-driven, high-pressure, public-facing places to work, populated by a colourful cast of characters of varying intensity (I say with utmost affection). In other words, you gotta love it.
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But another commonality they share is the existential threat they face. I've been told 'newspapers are dying' since I began my career in 2006; in 2020, when the world shut down owing to a global pandemic, many restaurants — beloved ones, too — were forced to close their doors forever. People's eating and spending habits have shifted. Takeout has continued to replace dine in, a trend hastened by food-delivery apps.
Restaurants and newspapers provide a service, yes, but they also provide tangible, offline experiences and rituals. A delicious meal, beautifully presented, enjoyed with great company. A thoughtfully curated selection of the things you should care about, read over a morning coffee in a favourite mug. This is how things become knit into the fabric of our lives, the fabric of our cities. It's through the ritual.
And if these places are any good at what they do, they become institutions. Indispensable, reliable, trusted parts of the community we can't imagine life without — and that we grieve if and when they do close.
The Bear is a reminder there's still an appetite for the analogue.
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Jen ZorattiColumnist
Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen.
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