What You Need To Remember To Watch The Bear Season 2
The FX and Hulu series "The Bear" was like a truly incredible culinary experience turned cinematic, capturing the chaos of working in kitchens with a kind of ferocity that has to be seen to be believed. Anyone who's ever forgotten to yell "corner" and gotten creamed by someone with a full tray of drinks or burned their hand so many times that their calluses grew calluses could instantly find the rhythm of the show.
"The Bear" follows Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), who left the world of Michelin stars and gourmet kitchens to take over his family's sandwich restaurant, The Original Beef of Chicagoland, after the death of his brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal). Much of the first season focused on Carmy, who — with some help from his sister Sugar (Abby Elliott) — tried to get the staff of the Beef to step up their game in part by hiring a smart young chef named Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) to help him whip things into shape. It takes a whole lot of arguing and one of the worst business days in the shop's history to make it all come together, but Sydney and Carmy have a plan for the future; one that involves starting over completely.
Season 2 of "The Bear" premieres June 22, 2023, exclusively on Hulu, and it jumps right back in and hits the ground running. (You can check out our review here!) A whole lot happened in that first season, especially right at the end, so let's take a quick look back at everything you'll need to remember to enjoy the new season.
A whole lotta chaos
In season 1 of "The Bear," created by Christopher Storer, we get to know the crew of the Beef: family friend/"cousin" Richie (Ebon-Moss Bachrach), baker-turned-pastry-chef Marcus (Lionel Boyce), feisty line cook Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), wise veteran line cook Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson), line cook "Sweeps" (Corey Hendrix), and dishwashers Angel (José Cervantes) and Manny (Richard Esteras). There's also Neil (Matty Matheson), Carmy's childhood friend who helps the restaraunt as a handyman. Over the course of season 1 they try to fix the Beef by incorporating the Escoffier-style French brigade system of kitchen hierarchy, which gives the crew a newfound sense of camaraderie and self-respect, but also doesn't quite work with the systems that have been in place at the restaurant for decades.
Things aren't going great for Carmy. He discovers that his brother owed their uncle Cicero (Oliver Platt) $300,000 and was making payments to an imaginary company called "KBL Electronics." Richie finds a letter Mikey wrote to Carmy that might explain things but keeps it from him due to a disagreement, which means things only continue to spiral. By the seventh episode of the season, Carmy and Sydney's attempt at doing online orders turns into the world's biggest disaster. The entire crew is furious with one another, and it all comes to a head. Richie gives Carmy the letter and it includes Mikey's special recipe for spaghetti sauce, something the crew had been missing for family meal. The cans of sauce have something much, much more than tasty tomatoes in them, however — they're full of cold, hard cash.
A fresh start
It turns out that Mikey was keeping all kinds of secrets from his friends and his brother, including the fact that "KBL Electronics" was actually just a code for the cans, which he marked "KBL." When Carmy discovers the money, he gets the rest of the kitchen in on opening up the cans, even Sydney, who had previously been on the outs following the horrors of their online ordering fiasco. With enough money to pay off the mob and maybe do some work on the restaurant, they have the chance to basically start over and do things their way. That's exactly what they decide to do, closing down The Original Beef of Chicagoland for good and letting people know that a new establishment is coming soon, called — you guessed it — The Bear.
The first season ended with everyone coming together to try and push for the new restaurant, which will be a massive undertaking. Thankfully, the trials they endured trying to run the sandwich shop have bound them together, and they're on their way to becoming a real found family. Things will probably continue to be hectic, but at least Carmy and the crew all have a lot of love for one another and can get through almost anything. Let's just hope they come up with a better online ordering system.