Scrubbing The Bear from My Soul

Fine dining PTSD, cleanliness and catharsis

I didn’t want to watch “The Bear.” Every chef I know warned me about it.

But a dear friend suggested I give it a try, and I figured it had been long enough since I was involved in fine dining that I could watch it, much as when I decided to watch “The Sopranos” in 2019, a decade after that show first aired. (I am from the part of New Jersey “The Sopranos” is set, and it hits a little too close too often.)

Re: The Bear. Eh, too soon.

The show captures a lot of what is wrong about fine dining: The pressure, the hazing, the ridiculousness of the food, the shitshow of being fully weeded, the misfits we all are. The episode after the restaurant gets a good review made my physically ill. FIRE EVERYTHING! Oh God, I want to throw up just typing this.

But it’s the second season that hits harder. And the episode where Richie stages at the Alinea clone restaurant hit hardest of all. His transformation mirrored my own. Like a lightning bolt, all of a sudden precision and cleanliness and above all, service, mattered. Even in the littlest thing.

That mode, where you are utterly focused on the task at hand, a task that is, ultimately, about making people happy, about acts of service, is a mode I have always striven to attain, yet mostly failed to reach. It is one of my great character flaws that my brain senses that my “good enough” is more than good enough to most people. So I slack.

I can trace it back to high school, where, early in my career at Westfield High, I quickly realized that I could do minimal effort and get A-minuses or at worst B-pluses. Good enough to placate mom, who demanded good grades, and still earn money as a carpet cleaner and run track and field. Oh yeah, and drink shitloads of beer and smoke that ditch weed we called pot back in the 1980s.

Once I learn a thing, I am usually (not always) pretty decent at it. Cooking is an example. I only worked as a restaurant chef a few years in graduate school. I went from dishwasher to sous chef in that time, which, if you’ve not been in that business, is pretty fast.

Then I left kitchens for journalism, where the same pattern held. I got very good at covering politics, but always preferred to be a big fish in a small pond — bureau chief at the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star in Virginia, and the Stockton Record in California — to being one of many in a better newsroom like the Washington Post or the San Francisco Chronicle. Left to run free, I explored my job in my own way, largely unfettered. And I made a mark in both states.

But I’ve always wondered what if?

What if I’d stayed in fine dining? What if I’d swallowed my pride and started as a grunt in a larger newsroom? Would I be better? What even is better?

Watching “The Bear” brings this out in full force. I watch this show as if I were there. And while my family is not even remotely as dysfunctional as Chef Carmen’s, that Christmas episode really did make me physically ill, because I’ve tasted that bitterness in my own home, and had to swallow whole gobs of it while in the homes of my childhood friends. There’s a reason that ep won so many awards…

Back to Richie and his transformation.

That realization is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in this show so far; I haven’t watched the current season. And it’s why I decided to write about this at all.

Serious cleanliness amounts to basic table stakes in a professional kitchen.

I learned it young, then forgot it, then relearned it alongside Rachel Rinas, my right hand in many of my kitchen adventures. Rachel lives in Kansas City and has been a chef since she was in her late teens; she’s in her late 30s now. Rachel and I have become fast friends, in no small part because we cook together seamlessly. This sort of mind meld occurs in coworkers only very rarely, and I am grateful for everything I’ve learned from her.

Working clean, and I mean really clean, chief among them. In the show, Richie starts wearing suits “because it makes me feel better about myself.” Anyone who’s ever put on a well-made suit feels this. A suit is armor against the world. So are chef’s whites.

And so is working in a spotless environment. A light, clean, bright kitchen is a joy to work in, a place where anything is possible. Rachel and I would scrub our kitchen at grouse camp weekly last year, and we’d silently position to be the one to sweep the floor at the end of the night’s service — that sweep being the final lines of that day’s story.

A seriously clean kitchen is a precursor to precise food. And while fine-dining precision is a bit much for me — yes, I own tweezers, but try to never use them except to pull splinters from my fingers — some precision makes or breaks a dish. Especially if you’re the one writing the recipe.

Bakers know this, because an off measurement can destroy the whole loaf or cake. Brewers and meat curers understand this, too. Gram measurements only. But it’s less evident in savory cooking because, like High School Hank, we all quickly realize that good enough is good enough for most people. And if you’re cooking dinner for your family on a Tuesday night, that’s OK.

But precision is vital if you want to be able to repeat your results. And I need others to be able to repeat my recipes accurately every time, because a poorly written recipe can ruin perhaps the only elk tenderloin that person is ever going to cook. Sometimes I’ve forgotten this. Walking into a pristine kitchen brings it all back.

I scrubbed my kitchen today, floor to ceiling.

Every surface, every cabinet, every bit of my steel stove. I decluttered my counters, purged the pantry and the refrigerator. Bleached the sink, ground out the stains in the grout while on my hands and knees.

It felt good. Cathartic. A deep cleaning session will keep your mind off awful things beyond your control. And, if I am honest, even awful things that are in your control.

When it was done, I stood up. Inhaled. Soaked it in. Ready to cook. Ready to move on.