- Chef Mark Strausman doesn't think FX's "The Bear" accurately portrays the restaurant business.
- He called the show "melodramatic fiction" and compared it to Netflix's "The Crown."
Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri, stars of FX's "The Bear," trained with professional chefs to prepare for their roles in the show about a struggling Chicago sandwich shop. But Mark Strausman, an award-winning chef who spent over two decades as the executive chef at Freds inside Barneys New York before opening his own restaurant, Mark's Off Madison, doesn't think the show accurately portrays the restaurant industry.
Strausman told Insider that he has "absolutely not" watched "The Bear," but he has seen and heard enough about the show to believe that it's a piece of "melodramatic fiction."
"Did you hear what Prince Harry said about 'The Crown?' It's the same thing," Strausman said.
In a 2021 appearance on "The Late Late Show With James Corden," the Duke of Sussex called the Netflix show "fictional," but "loosely based on the truth." Harry also told the late-night host that he was "way more comfortable with 'The Crown'" than tabloid stories about his family that "pretend to be news."
"It gives you a rough idea about what that lifestyle, what the pressures of putting duty and service above family and everything else, what can come from that," Harry said.
Strausman feels similarly about "The Bear," a show in which characters are often shown yelling at and berating each other amid the stress of running a chaotic restaurant kitchen.
"I mean, listen, Hollywood is there to make money. Hollywood is there to write stories that people want to watch," he said. "It's not a historic event, but that's not the restaurant business. Certainly not my restaurant. We treat people with respect in the kitchen. We have HR. So that's all dramatic television fiction, and we love great fiction."
While Strausman might not be a fan of the show, other chefs have written about how they felt "The Bear" reflected their experiences in the food service industry.
In a 2022 piece for Bon Appétit, Genevieve Yam, who studied at the International Culinary Center before working in Michelin-star kitchens, called the series' portrayal of toxic fine-dining culture "painfully real." Chef Jane Brendlinger, who has worked in New York City restaurants for 10 years, wrote in Food and Wine in 2022 that the show features "moments of exaggeration and melodrama, somewhat excessive use of industry jargon, and some plot points that frankly don't make sense," but it also made her and her restaurant colleagues relive their "real-life trauma" with its detailed depiction of chef life.
Representatives for FX did not respond to Insider's request for comment.