She’ll need to develop it ASAP. Carmy hasn’t abandoned his colleagues yet, but he has fully, perhaps a bit performatively, ceded leadership of the kitchen to Syd. The Bear has always been great at registering the subtle shifts in characters’ relationships to one another; some of this season’s most fascinating scenes find these two chefs working side by side, as she struggles to direct the man who was, just yesterday, her boss and he forces himself to stay out of her way. It would be a tough night even if executing her first menu were all Syd had to worry about.
It isn’t, by a long shot. For all the speculation around Richie’s fate, he turns out to be fine, the car accident just one more delay in a day of setbacks. (A show in tighter control of its storytelling probably would have avoided such cheap suspense, but plot has never been The Bear’s strength.) His real problem is that the reservation app is down, making the service ahead a black box of anxiety. Meanwhile, torrential rains have Chicago at a standstill, and the Bear’s plumbing is not exactly solid on its best days; repeated closeups of a pile of cigarette butts bulging and swirling in a sewer grate capture the loss of control. The restaurant’s gloriously foulmouthed backer, Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), has even more urgent money problems than he let on last season. Carmy’s sister and co-owner, Sugar (Abby Elliott), having nervously left her baby in the care of the mom (Jamie Lee Curtis) who so disastrously disserved her and her brothers, keeps ordering cuts to portions. But such measures seem kind of futile for a business that is already, by any rational measure, beyond saving. Servers are quitting. The season opens with a sleepless Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) panic-cooking Brussels sprouts at home, as her husband (David Zayas) assures her that even if she loses her dream job, they’ll survive.
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