Are You My Customer? (part 2)

Struggling with The Bear, Season 2

            Season 2 of The Bear offers an even more powerful and extravagant      allegory of the redemptive, healing powers of the highest forms of service work.  The Bear has met with almost universal critical acclaim. It is the most contemporary and the most powerful of all the service industry fictions we have encountered so far. Centered on the fate of a landmark Chicago hole in the wall restaurant called The Beef, The Bear argues that transforming a grimy, family-owned restaurant with one signature dish (the messy and inelegant beef sandwich, sister of The Menu’s cheeseburger of authenticity) into a Danish minimalist restaurant with Michelin star ambitions will save the people who work for it by elevating them to a more refined level of service provision. The Bear, like A Gentleman in Moscow, tells us that the disciplined service qualities of fine dining and fine design are uplifting and healing – they offer a way for lost but talented souls like Tina, Richie, Marcus and Carmen to move from caricatural blue collar psychological lifeworlds to artisanal craft discipline.