Salt without Saltiness: The Death of Hospitality in The Bear

“We cook to nourish people.” BearThe third season ofReal-life celebrity chef Thomas Keller conveys this mission statement, inherited from his mentor, to fictional chef Carmen Belzatto (Jeremy Allen White) in a flashback to Carmen’s first day on the job. French LaundryBut what happens when professions and institutions dedicated to caring for others stop being caring and nurturing? What happens when one of the most basic elements of the kitchen, salt, loses its salty flavor? Bearcomes across, especially in comparison to the first two seasons, as a warning against the deviations in mission that can take hospitality away from a caring organization. This is a tragedy to be lamented as depicted in the show, and churches should take note of how deeply our culture desires true compassion and welcome.

We don’t hear Keller’s words until the beginning of the third season finale. Bear Reminders of the chef’s calling pile up like a crowded plate on a Saturday night. Various characters, both main and supporting, have moments of compassion throughout the series. But The Bear (the restaurant, not the show of the same name) becomes so dysfunctional and uncaring by the end of the season that it leads to multiple broken relationships, potential staff upheaval, inconsistent service that even team members perceive as “off,” and poor reviews that threaten their financial future.

Carmie’s career so far has been a tornado between two opposing ideas of professional cooking: Keller, chef Andrea Terry (Olivia Colman), and the restaurant’s life-affirming approach. Noma All of this suggests that Carmy demands a certain kind of rigorous professionalism, not in spite of but because of how much they care about their diners. This kind of food brings life, renews it, and celebrates it. Meanwhile, Chef David (Joel McHale) is focused only on a cold, defined kind of excellence. What he praises has absolutely no relation to the people who actually eat his food. As Carmy puts it, “I don’t think he sleeps. I don’t think he eats. I don’t think he loves.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard such a damning indictment of a hospitality professional.

The closest Carmy comes in season three to fully succumbing to the temptations of his abusive, traumatic, neglectful path is when he decides to change the menu every day “so they know what they can do.” While this line probably won’t make it onto any list of Season 3’s best quotes, it’s a key inflection point that defines the trajectory of the restaurant and the rest of the season. It’s not the decision to change the menu itself, but Carmy’s reasons for doing so that show how far off the mark he has been. This justification, along with his other non-negotiables, is the practice of a chef who no longer cooks to nourish people. Carmy is on an impossible quest for pristine perfectionism in the eyes of “them.” By the time Carmy has his long-awaited confrontation with the emptiness of David’s approach, he has already been leading his restaurant the way David did for weeks.

It’s hard to miss how the writers portray this deviation from the mission. Apart from flashbacks and supporting characters trying to keep the fires burning on their own, viewers and guests are bombarded with a chaotic, incoherent menu and service, with numbers and money where we once saw faces and people. The food, previously the unspoken protagonist of the show, is reduced to a grotesqueness through its repetition and jarring camera angles. By contrast, the filming of earlier seasons frequently showcased beautiful dishes, suggesting that the show’s crew is not spiteful towards fine cuisine, but rather towards what happens when food is no longer made as an act of compassion.

What’s especially striking is that while anger is ever-present in season three, there’s something else suffocating Bear: a hollow, simmering hunger. The sound mixing, which vacillates between overstimulating and truly haunting, the increased use of cool tones, the blurry edits that play along with the passage of time, and the ugly unnecessaryness of broken and meaningless dishes all sound like creatures struggling for air before succumbing to emptiness and decay. The writers could have simply relied on expletives and hurled pans to tell the story of inhospitable hospitality, but this immersive approach invites us to feel it. What we’re given is worse than dissonance. At least the anger is alive. Instead, what we feel in the dreary dining room and indifferent kitchen is death: the death of purpose and the death of love. If you’ve finished season three of this show about a restaurant that feels strangely unfulfilled and hungry, you’ve experienced the dark irony the writers were aiming for.

Season 3 Bear The film works so well because its visceral impact pulls us from the hope of revitalizing hospitality to the pain of its collapse. We humans were born to eat together, to celebrate and to console. We tend to be surprisingly good at telling when our plates are empty or when our servers have forgotten us. Most of us have encountered a restaurant, a home, or a church that, as Neil Jeff Fuck (Matty Matheson) says about his employer, “has a weird vibe.” How quickly we would have wanted to leave if it hadn’t been a place we cared about. Or how deeply we grieved to see the welcoming flames of a place where we once felt at home die out. We grieve because the things that are supposed to promote life are instead starving it. Our souls know how wrong that is. If that were to happen, there would be no “perfect” food in the world that was enough to satisfy our hunger.

It would be a sad tragedy for the kitchen, which has long been the heartbeat of human society, to lose its purpose as a place of compassion. It would be equally tragic for other forms of welcome and compassion to disappear. The church is no exception. This is personal for me. I am a pastor, but a more fundamental part of my identity is that I am someone who really enjoys cooking. I love to experiment, to create, and sometimes to brag. But I fell in love with cooking because I enjoy it with the people I love. BearI pursue the joy of knowing that my loved ones have enjoyed a meal, but more importantly, They They know they have a place at the table too.

Simply put, the hospitality connection is teeth My faith is my faith and therefore influences my ministry. That’s why the show caught my attention so quickly and why season three hit so well. In my own kitchen, I felt a calling to pursue what’s next, going against what people really want: togetherness. And in every corner of my life, I’m constantly battling a hunger for perfection that’s inherently isolating. As Mike Belzatto (Jon Bernthal) narrates in a flashback, so many special moments in our lives revolve around food, especially food. To each other. I can’t do it well if I’m focused on anything other than the actual people I say I serve.

This lesson does not end at the doorstep of my kitchen. Sadly, many of us can name churches that fell prey to evil predations such as abusive leaders or oppressive belief systems. But what about those who lose their focus on compassion because they began chasing ostensibly good things for the wrong reasons? A new program, attendance number, budget, or building project can all be positive, just like a new recipe or a big meal, but without compassion at the center, no matter how much we consume, it will only alienate us and make us hungry. A church that forgets its mission to nurture people loses its saltiness, and salt that has lost its saltiness is in danger of being tossed out along with the countless culinary experiments that Carmy tosses in the trash.

The topic of legacy comes up often in Season 3, forcing us to ponder on what we leave behind, but the most solemn reminders are the two funerals we witness in the present-day timeline. At the beginning of the season, Marcus says goodbye to his mother; he tells the gathered mourners that he enjoyed simply sitting in the kitchen while his mother cooked. In the final episode, the culinary world witnesses the final night of Chef Terry’s famed restaurant, Ever. Richie asks to spend Ever’s final funeral in the kitchen instead of the dining room for the same reasons as Marcus: each kitchen is a place where they’ve seen the magic of compassion happen and where they’ve learned the value of compassion.

We often think about who will come to our funerals, but who would come if the church we go to closed down and we had a funeral farewell like the one at Eber? Who would ask to stay in the kitchen one last time? Would they want to avoid the ugly arguments, the less-than-favoured recipes and the distracted service? Or would they see where the magic happens? If we are at work, they will see our efforts and say, with chef Thomas Keller, “It’s all about nurturing.”