FX’s critically acclaimed “The Bear” is a comedy-drama television series about food, family and the insanity of the grind. It’s a losing battle every day in the restaurant business, and as Carmy pushes himself harder than ever and demands excellence from his crew, they do their best to match his intensity. Their quest for culinary excellence propels them to new levels and stresses the bonds that hold the restaurant together.
A young talented chef named Carmen “Carmy” Anthony Berzatto inherits his family’s Italian beef sandwich shop after the suicide of his older brother Michael. He comes home to Chicago to run it, leaving behind his world of working in Michelin-starred restaurants. He is left to deal with his brother’s unresolved debts, a rundown kitchen, and an unruly staff, while dealing with his own pain and family trauma.
The third season was released on June 26, 2024, and the show has been renewed for a fourth.
The series has received critical acclaim, particularly for its writing, directing, acting, and production values, as well as its examination of its subject matter. Season 2 has received 23 Emmy nominations and set a comedy series record.
Part of the show’s appeal is it gives you a behind the scenes look at the operations of a restaurant. If the show has sparked a new interest within you in the people behind the restaurant world or in the lives of cooks and chefs, these culinary memoirs listed below and available (in book or ebook format) with your Livingston Library card also pull back the curtain for you to take a look.
Some of the memoirs give a behind the scenes look at a restaurant kitchen, others are riveting stories of the early struggles faced by professional chefs or food writers and how they ultimately find themselves and their homes in the kitchen.
Blood, Bones, and Butter : The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton
Follows an unconventional journey through the many kitchens Hamilton has inhabited through the years: the rural kitchen of her childhood, where her adored mother stood over the six-burner with an oily wooden spoon in hand; the kitchens of France, Greece, and Turkey, where she was often fed by complete strangers and learned the essence of hospitality; Hamilton’s own kitchen at her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, with its many unexpected challenges; and the kitchen of her Italian mother-in-law, who serves as the link between Hamilton’s idyllic past and her own future family—the result of a prickly marriage that nonetheless yields lasting dividends.
Beaten, Seared, and Sauced: On Becoming a Chef at the Culinary Institute of America by Jonathan Dixon
On the eve of his thirty-eighth birthday and after shuffling through a series of unsatisfying jobs, Dixon enrolled in the CIA (on a scholarship) to pursue his passion for cooking. Here he tells hilarious and harrowing stories of life at the CIA as he and his classmates navigate the institution’s many rules and customs under the watchful and critical eyes of their instructors. Each part of the curriculum is covered, from knife skills and stock making to the high-pressure cooking tests and the daunting wine course (the undoing of many a student). Dixon also details his externship in the kitchen of Danny Meyer’s Tabla, giving readers a look into the inner workings of a celebrated New York City restaurant. Dixon delivers a gripping day-to-day chronicle of his transformation from amateur to professional and offers a fascinating and intimate first-person view of one of America’s most famous culinary institutions and one of the world’s most coveted jobs.
Burn the Place by Iliana Regan
A galvanizing culinary memoir that chronicles Regan’s journey from foraging on the family farm to opening her Michelin-starred restaurant, Elizabeth. Her story is alive with startling imagery, raw like that first bite of wild onion, and told with uncommon emotional power. an underrepresented perspective from the professional kitchen, and a young star chef whose prose is as memorable and deserving of praise as her food.
Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook by Alice Waters
This critically acclaimed memoir from a cultural icon and culinary standard bearer recalls the circuitous road and tumultuous times leading to the opening of her “little French restaurant” in Berkeley, California in 1971 at the age of 27. Waters turned her passion project into an iconic institution that redefined American cuisine for generations of chefs and food lovers.
Dotted with stories, recipes, photographs, and letters, this is a quietly revealing look at one woman’s evolution from a rebellious yet impressionable follower to a respected activist who effects social and political change on a global level through the common bond of food.
Cooking As Fast As I Can : A Chef’s Story of Family, Food, and Forgiveness by Cora Cat
Before she became a renowned chef and Food Network star, Cat was just a girl from Jackson, Mississippi, where days were slow and every meal was made from scratch. Her love of cooking started in her Greek home, where fresh feta and home-cured olives graced the table. Cora chronicles how she found her passion in the kitchen and went on to attend the prestigious Culinary Institute of America and apprentice under Michelin star chefs in France. After her big break as a co-host with Rocco Di Spirito on the Food Network’s Melting Pot, Cat broke barriers by becoming the first-ever female contestant on Iron Chef.
Dirt : Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking For the Secrets of French Cooking by Bill Buford
A hilariously self-deprecating, highly obsessive account of the author’s adventures, in the world of French haute cuisine. Studying at L’Institut Bocuse, cooking at the storied, Michelin-starred La Mère Brazier, enduring the endless hours and exacting rigeur of the kitchen, Buford becomes a man obsessed—with proving himself on the line, proving that he is worthy of the gastronomic secrets he’s learning, proving that French cooking actually derives from (mon dieu!) the Italian.
Eat a Peach : A Memoir by David Chang
Traces Chang’s journey from growing up in a deeply religious Korean American family to teaching English in Japan where he struggled with mental health but discovered that cooking may be his purpose to the improbable series of events that led him to the top of his profession. He wrestles with his lifelong feelings of otherness and inadequacy, explores the mental illness that almost killed him, and finds hope in the shared value of deliciousness. Along the way, Chang gives us a penetrating look at restaurant life, in which he balances his deep love for the kitchen with unflinching honesty about the industry’s history of brutishness and its uncertain future.
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
Bourdain, host of Parts Unknown, reveals “twenty-five years of sex, drugs, bad behavior and haute cuisine” in this deliciously funny and shockingly delectable book, sure to delight gourmands and philistines alike. From Bourdain’s first oyster in the Gironde, to his lowly position as dishwasher in a honky tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown (where he witnesses for the first time the real delights of being a chef); from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, to drug dealers in the east village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain’s tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable.
Memoir of the Sunday Brunch by Julia Pandl
At age twelve, Pandl was initiated into the rite of the Sunday brunch, a weekly madhouse at Pandl’s, the family-owned Milwaukee-based restaurant where she and her eight older siblings did mandatory service—and where her father “traded his sanity for a paper chef hat and a set of utility tongs.” Amid the controlled chaos, they learned the ropes of the business and, more importantly, life lessons that would shape them in the years to come. Part coming-of-age story and part window into the mysteries of the restaurant business, this memoir is filled with tender wisdom about the bonds between fathers and daughters, and about the simple pleasures that lie in the daily ritual of breaking bread.
Nobu : A Memoir by Nobuyuki Matsuhisa
A fascinating and unique memoir by the acclaimed celebrity chef and international restaurateur, Nobu, as he divulges both his dramatic life story and reflects on the philosophy and passion that has made him one of the world’s most widely respected Japanese fusion culinary artists.
Notes From a Young Black Chef : A Memoir by Kwame Onwuachi
As a boy Onwuachi was sent from the Bronx to rural Nigeria by his mother to ‘learn respect.’ Through food, he broke out of a dangerous downward spiral and embarked on a new beginning at the bottom of the culinary food chain before going on to train in the kitchens of some of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country and appearing as a contestant on Top Chef. His love of food and cooking was a constant, even when the road to success was riddled with potholes. Here he shares the pursuit of his passions, despite the odds.
Sous Chef : 24 Hours on the Line by Michael Gibney
An executive sous chef who has worked alongside cooks from some of the nation’s leading restaurants documents an intense twenty-four-hour period that illuminates the allures and adversities of a professional culinary life. Told in second-person narrative, this book is an immersive, adrenaline-fueled run that offers a fly-on-the-wall perspective on the food service industry, allowing readers to briefly inhabit the hidden world behind the kitchen doors, in real time. This exhilarating account provides regular diners and food enthusiasts alike a detailed insider’s perspective, while offering fledgling professional cooks an honest picture of what the future holds, ultimately giving voice to the hard work and dedication around which chefs have built their careers.
32 Yolks : From My Mother’s Table To Working the Line by Eric Ripert
Before he earned his third Michelin star at his iconic restaurant, Le Bernardin, the James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef of the Year, became a regular guest judge on Bravo’s Top Chef, even before he knew how to make a proper omelet, Eric Ripert was a young boy in the South of France who felt that his world had come to an end. At the age of five, his parents went through a bitter divorce. Eric moved away with his mother, whose new husband, Serge, quickly grew to resent Eric and seemed to delight in making him miserable. The only place Eric felt at home was the kitchen, where his mother tried to cheer him up with lavish meals, but once the plates had been cleared, his unhappiness returned. Then he met Jacques, a locally renowned chef and restaurant owner. Jacques took Eric under his wing, letting him into his kitchen everyday after school where he would teach Eric how to make real chocolate mousse and regale him with stories from his travels. Watching Jacques and the obvious pride he took in his work, Eric began to see a future for himself, one in which his lifelong love of food could become something that he shared with other people. His desire to not only cook but to become the best would lead him into some of the most celebrated and demanding kitchens in Paris, serving under legendary chefs like Joel Robuchon and Jean Louis Palladin and trying to survive the brutal, exacting environment of their kitchens.
Yes, Chef A Memoir by Marcus Samuelsson
Chronicles Samuelsson’s remarkable journey from his grandmother’s humble kitchen to some of the most demanding and cutthroat restaurants in Switzerland and France, from his grueling stints on cruise ships to his arrival in New York City, where his outsize talent and ambition finally come together at Aquavit, earning him a coveted New York Times three-star rating at the age of 24 and fulfilling his dream of creating a truly diverse multiracial dining room with the opening of the beloved Red Rooster in Harlem.
—Archana Chiplunkar, Adult Services & Acquisitions Librarian