The Strays

(Minor spoilers for The Bear season 2 lie ahead)

Episode four of season two of The Bear takes a slight detour from a Chicago family restaurant aiming to reinvent itself to a high-end kitchen in the Netherlands. The Chicago shop’s head chefs send their baker, Marcus, to Copenhagen to learn some new dishes from a pastry chef named Luca.

Bright and early just before 5 am after crossing an ocean, Marcus meets Luca in the kitchen and hits the ground running. The show immediately portrays Luca as a prototypical upscale chef; straight to the point in his instructions with high expectations. But what surprises me as Marcus continues to train under him is his patience and calm.

Now Marcus is no slouch. Last season, he established himself as one of the most creative and hardworking talents in the restaurant. He kept meticulous notes and drawings of pastry ideas in his journal while stocking the whole kitchen with loaves of bread and rolls needed for their homestyle dishes. He’s demonstrated he’s more than capable of excelling in the hyper-competitive dining industry. But just because it’s clear you have what it takes doesn’t mean anyone - especially a person with power, experience to share, or both - will give you the time and space it takes to realize your potential. And yet Luca does!

He never yells at Marcus when he stumbles. He doesn’t accost him with petty or offensive insults and slurs like JK Simmons in Whiplash. He’s stern and consistent while also kind and helpful (and a bit goofy). Finally the two open up to each other in one of my favorite scenes of television in recent memory.

They ask each other how they found themselves cutting and weighing chunks of raw dough together at 5 in the morning. Luca shares that he ended up as a dishwasher for misbehaving when he was young and fell in love with working in kitchens. He never looked back and he always felt like he was the best wherever he went, until he got a job with this other young chef. It’s heavily implied that this other young chef is Carmy (arguably the main character of the show and head of the restaurant back in Chicago) but I digress. Luca admits this other chef was the best he’d ever seen. Better than Luca could ever hope to be. And Luca ultimately decided the best thing he could do for himself was try to keep up.

“And did you get better?” Marcus asks.
“Better than I ever thought I could be.”

I’m paraphrasing here because I’m too lazy to look up the actual quote. Marcus then jokingly refers to Luca as the Scotty Pippen to this chef’s Michael Jordan. “Still a hall of famer!” Marcus’ path to the kitchen also took some twists and turns. He was a D3 college football player and eventually found his way into kitchens needing to make money to support his sick mother. He started at a McDonald’s and ended up at his current restaurant because he was in there for lunch a lot and the previous owner wanted to open a bakery.

I adored watching a black man from Chicago live out his dreams. Marcus went on a whole journey centered on him and his quest to hone his craft and find his beauty. It was joyful. We don’t see enough of it. This episode serves as a blueprint and proof-of-concept for TV to give us more character journeys like this.

I also love that this episode shows us how driven, highly skilled people can achieve and learn so much from each other without the bitterness and vitriol we’re bred to believe needs to be part of the process. We don’t have to tear each other down to build ourselves up. We don’t have to sabotage those who are or may become better than us at one time or another. We all learn and grow best when we give others the space, time, and tools they need to make the best of themselves.