Does the Chicago of “The Bear” Exist? (And Do We Care?)

Perhaps you—like many—have watched all eight episodes of FX on Hulu’s The Bear, emerging from an au jus-soaked sweat for either Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy or Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Richie, or, at the very least, feeling inspired to work on a beautiful ganache for a rich chocolate cake. The Kitchen Nightmares dramedy is equal parts enlivening and invigorating, brash enough to justify its gooey inside. But by the end of the show’s bombastic first season—it has just been picked up for a second—viewers may be left with one central question: Where the hell does this thing take place?

Just kidding—has a show ever worked harder to prove where it’s located? The Bear puts Joe Swanberg to shame. Its Chicago-y Chicagoness has been the subject of blogs adoring and critical, and more tweets than my humble Midwestern-dense feed can manage. There’s a begrudging joy in seeing Matty Matheson in a Hopewell t-shirt, just as there is equal annoyance in a long-winded story that winds up being a Bill Murray anecdote (the only place any Chicagoan I know has seen him was on the golf course). As a Chicagoland native and—perhaps more crucially—a River North scholar, to some degree, I watched with near-bated breath wondering if The Bear actually has anything to do with Chicago.

At first glance? Not really. Sure, they name drop streets and restaurants left and right, there’s the aforementioned Hopewell t-shirt, we get plenty of shots of sous chef Sydney (played by Ayo Edebiri) waiting for the El in AirPods (so true). There’s a smart decision being made on the part of Christopher Storer’s show to keep the drama mostly in the restaurant: this keeps the drama and tension high throughout the punchy 30-minute episodes. In turn, however, we’re robbed of seeing where these characters live, how they interact with their own neighborhoods and families. We get a glimpse of Sydney’s home life, sure, in a cute railroad apartment, and I’d bet you dollars to floor donuts that Carmy is living in Avondale, but without these roots, these characters might as well just (like baker Marcus might) live in the restaurant.

River North’s Mr. Beef—essentially The Bear’s central restaurant, called The Original Beef of Chicagoland in the show—is located on Orleans and Huron Streets, amid large converted warehouses not home to Chicago’s blue collar working class so much as hundreds of Chicagoland area and Midwestern transplants working at, well, website jobs. Graphic designers, startup employees. For a show about a hotshot young chef taking over a neighborhood establishment, what better place to set it than in River North, in which the same thing has been happening for two decades?  

In fact, River North is almost perfect as the setting for The Bear—a neighborhood equally as push and pull with itself as the tonal shifts of the show. Only in River North do you go from designer lamp store to 75-year-old diner to designer rug store at equal measure and still maintain that Chicago, half locals and half Ohioan transplants, is an underdog city. It’s hard to believe The Bear’s Mr. Beef would fail because it’s hard to believe anything in River North would fail. An investment banker once told me that River North was the most exciting neighborhood in Chicago. Full of half-empty high-rises and salad chains? Whatever gets your rocks off. 

The Bear takes place in Chicago because the metaphor only works in Chicago, the scrappy white young chef who believes he is at some kind of disadvantage. The truth is that Carmy could have landed at any hometown restaurant and done fine; the truth is that a chef of Carmy’s stature would have transformed The Beef overnight. Foodie types bemoaning the wait times at XOCO would have blown up The Beef within a matter of days, ruining its supply for Richie’s local boys that hang out front.  

To think too hard about the logic of The Bear ruins its fun, though, as does mulling on the Chicagoness of it all. If nothing else, the Chicago of it all is like a set-up and punchline joke a kid tells you; cute for its effort, but not much else. There’s a character named Cicero? That’d be like if they called a guy "Fountain Avenue" or "Bedford L." Look, I’m happy to see my hometown, happy to point at stuff I know on screen, happy to say "a Polish guy from Chicago wouldn’t sound like that but go off, I guess." It’s watchable, sleek-looking, and like any trip home, makes me extremely hungry. 

Top photo courtesy of FX.

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