Sometimes in life you are just a 26 year old teenage girl trying her best to build a fine dining resurraunt all by yourself from the ground up while your 30 year old teenage boy of a business partner fucks around and finds out.
i fuckin’ loved how they showed syd’s mental process for crafting recipes and how we got see her visualize a dish from the ground up (also how the plateware they wanted to choose for the restaurant was similar to what syd envisioned for her dish but they couldn’t afford it, ugh her mind, literally)
but someone give jamie lee curtis a goddamn fucking emmy for her portrayal of donna berzatto. holy fuck. the alcoholic spiral, her hot & cold volatile moods, her connection to her boys but not to her daughter, her batshit unhinged behavior, her overwhelming depression….“no one would fucking miss me” “maybe if i took a gun to my head and shot myself” “do you know how much i fucking hate it when you ask if i’m okay?”
she’s violent and it’s all rubbed off on mikey. she’s violent and it’s fucked irrevocably with nat’s head. she’s violent and it’s driven carmy away yet left him feeling guilty for getting the fuck out of there.
it’s the way the chaos in the kitchen at the Beef was an extension of her legacy. generational trauma dripping down from her to mikey to carmy until the Beef’s shutdown death. donna berzatto is entropy in the kitchen — the metaphorical space for interpersonal relationships, for closeness — and she justified the turmoil by the outcome she achieved. the seven fishes. the seven different meals. the ends justified the means, so don’t you dare ask if she’s okay because look! look! there are seven different meals cooked on the table that she’s done! she’s a provider all she ever does is provide but does anyone ever pause to say thank you? could a Not Okay person cook this complex meal? she’s fucking fine just look at the seven goddamn fishes.
it’s all right there in the food, she’s burying herself in the food. it’s this overcompensation to mask her shot mental state.
“just because i love it doesn’t mean i enjoy it” = just because i love my family doesn’t mean i enjoy them.
and it’s becoming so clear that the gutting of the Beef is a purging of the past. they honor where they came from by naming the new restaurant The Bear, but they will move forward with new tools and a new outlook. it’s breaking the messy, toxic kitchen cycle with better equipment and better people and a better foundation. doing it right this time right down to the licenses
It’s “I’m sorry” in sign. Two of my old chefs used to do it. If they were angry, fighting on the line, it helped. It was like their version of “let’s talk about this later”. Didn’t matter if one tore the other one apart, it always got them through service.
