taCity

The opening shot of the highly acclaimed TV show ‘The Bear’ sees the main character Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto staring down a caged brown bear in the heart of Chicago’s downtown. The motif, evidently a dream, nightmare or general vision rather than actual events, serves a telling mark not only of how Carmy has to wrestle a bear in order to achieve his ambition of opening a high-end restaurant where his brother’s old sandwich shop stands, but more tacitly, it evidences how he succumbs to the grizzly and violent process of gentrification that the program for me, so clearly narrates.

On the surface, the series presents a gritty, authentic look at the world of professional cooking through the eyes of Carmy, a young but highly talented and globally renowned chef who returns to his family’s sandwich shop in Chicago after a stint in the high end, fine dining worlds in Europe. However, a closer examination of the program reveals that “The Bear” is not just a story about the gratuitous food aesthetics, family politics or the pressures of running a high-end restaurant; it’s a narrative on the gentrification of Chicago, exploring themes of elitist consumption at the expense of working-class sensibilities, but in a way which annoyingly, kind of glorifies it.

That said, I enjoyed it immensely; it is shot fantastically, the characters are all very well-rounded and there are some incredibly intense episodes (the extended Seven Fishes flashback episode was one of the most emotionally-charged, engaging and downright tense single episodes of TV I’ve ever seen; Jamie Lee Curtis is simply incredible in it).

Overall, the two series of the show (so far, a third is being planned) meticulously captures the tension between the old and the new, tradition and innovation, the local and the global. Carmy’s efforts are to transform his brother Michael’s (who owned it before he died by suicide) no-frills sandwich shop, called The Original Beef of Chicagoland, into a venue that reflects his fine dining experiences. But this is a microcosm for the broader process of urban gentrification that has been reshaping cities across America, very much including Chicago. His vision for the restaurant includes introducing high-end ingredients, minimalist interior design aesthetics, expensive and complex recipes, symbolizing a shift towards elitist consumption patterns that often accompany gentrified neighbourhoods.

The show is based upon a real sandwich shop, called Mr. Beef, in the River North area of Chicago, an inner city neighbourhood with a fraught history of gentrification (ironically enough, the shop now receives hundreds of tourists a day now because of the success of the show, arguably saving it from closing down). But as real-life shop has maintained it’s working class and immigrant roots, the TV show has transformed it into something far more luxury, high-end and ‘global’.

This transformation is not without its challenges and conflicts. The show delves into the resistance Carmy faces from the existing staff, particularly his cousin Richie and the long-time cook Latino Tina, who view his changes with a sense of hostility. Their initial scepticism reflects the apprehensions of working-class communities who see gentrification as a threat to their cultural identity and economic survival. But as the second season progresses, both Richie and Tina are sent to culinary ‘schools’ to turn their obvious passion for the hospitality industry into a sleeker, and professionalised practice. Richie’s overnight transformation from a brash, reactionary but ultimately locally rooted all-round labourer into a high-end front-of-house managerial by simply working for a week at one of Carmy’s old restaurants is particularly jarring in this regard. He starts to wear a suit, and suddenly he is a polite, professional, and far more classically entrepreneurial individual. For me, it was a depressing, and rather unrealistic transition. On top of that, Michael, the previous owner, had a saying “let it rip”, which is passed down to Carmy and Richie as a mantra for the restaurant as a poignant reminder of Michael’s firebrand attitude. But in the context of the show’s themes I saw, I couldn’t help read this slogan as part of the classic neoliberal, Thatcherite ethos of ‘unleash the inner-entrepreneur in everyone’. It was eerily similar in tone.

Furthermore, the staff at the restaurant are multi-cultural, but the raced aspects of urban life are rarely touched upon if at all. I appreciate that this is not the thrust of the show, but how much of the ‘gritty realism’ for which the show has been praised can really be present if the race relations of a highly-charged, service industry – where difficult encounters with all sorts of people and their various politics happen regularly daily – is written completely out of the show?

In addition, the main financial benefactor of the restaurant’s transformation is Carmy’s Uncle Jimmy, someone who clearly is a rich businessman with a portfolio of investments across the city. But he is very clear at the outset that the money he lends to Carmy and his team is dependent upon the new restaurant making money: if not, he has no qualms about selling it, tearing it down and redeveloping it. So even the real estate capital that is so prevalent in the gentrification story in cities around the world is represented in the show. It also briefly touches upon the changing landscape of the surrounding street, with remarks on how dive bars have turned into health food shops. There is no getting away from the gentrification motifs littering the show.

The issue I have is that it is rarely paints the shop’s transformation as having a deleterious impact on the area; it is only ever narrativized as a positive thing for those involved. Clearly, the staff get upskilled, Carmy gets his restaurant of the ground, and the punters have some clearly very delicious food. But this is the story of the thousands upon thousands of gentrification stories that take place in our cities regularly. Too often, the nice new upmarket, trendier, and more expensive consumption patterns are eulogised at the expense of the communities they are displacing. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed The Bear very much on a dramatic level; it is engrossing and wonderfully intense at times. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it plays into the gentrification-is-good-actually narrative by only highlighting the positives, and not dramatizing the very real consequences felt by those left behind.