COMMENTARY, July 26 — Last month, I finished the final season of The Bear, the FX drama about a fine dining chef Carmy Berzatto who returns home to run his late brother’s sandwich shop.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
For one it was immensely rewarding to watch Richie Jerimovich — once bitter and broken after the loss of his best friend, Carmy’s brother Michael — evolve into a slick, lovable, foul-mouthed, front-of-house manager who found newfound purpose staging at a three-Michelin-starred restaurant, an experience that also won over his scepticism towards fine dining.
But the real reason I haven’t been able to stop thinking about The Bear is that it reminded me of why I fell in love with fine dining it the first place.
For all its unflinching, accurate depictions of the worst in fine dining — especially the abuse and the trauma that follows — the show ends on a characteristically heartfelt message: there is merit to the dedication these broken, flawed individuals show to the restaurant, and there is camaraderie, true family, in the devotion they’ve developed for one another.
Restaurants, fine dining restaurants especially, are a soul-crushing, physically taxing, emotionally draining business that chews up the people who work in them and spits them out.
It’s no wonder then that as reports of fine dining’s demise have surfaced over the last decade, the reception has been largely… positive?
Rather than mourned, the death of fine dining is being celebrated, if the countless op-eds doing so are to be believed.
These days, even our thinkpieces aren’t editorial anymore. Now people just film themselves speaking their mind into a tiny fuzzy mic and call it a day.
But nobody seems to be asking what, exactly, is being lost along with it.
What’s dying, as far as I can tell, is the format. Fine dining has become increasingly inaccessible, wrapped in exclusive etiquette and rules designed to intimidate the average diner.
It has become a demonstration of wealth and privilege, a way for the obscenely well-heeled to flaunt their cultured existence, and for the suits to empty their corporate accounts.
At its worst, it is an elitist members-only club, and the labour behind it — often immigrant, often underpaid — rarely gets the credit for making the show possible.
Yet fine dining is more than that.
It challenges the boundaries of what is possible in gastronomy, inspiring chefs to go where they’ve never been before, and pushing diners to expand their horizons of what it means to eat, beyond simply nourishment.
Above all, fine dining represents the zenith of hospitality.
After graduating from college, I was lucky enough to dine at The French Laundry with my parents.
It was an experience I’ll never forget, but not just for the warmth of our servers or the charm of eating “Oysters and Pearls” in that historic building.
The staff had organised a birthday surprise for a woman dining alone in a corner of the restaurant (how did they know it was her birthday... another mark of great hospitality!); after the cake and candles, she was escorted to the courtyard to enjoy her petit fours and a cigar privately.
Ask most chefs why they got into a fine dining kitchen in the first place, and the answers vary.
For some, it is about learning from the best in the business; others want to make something of themselves outside of the rut and monotony of the nine-to-five; a select few need that environment to satisfy their obsessive need for excellence.
Ultimately, all three have one thing in common: every night, they relish the opportunity to give a stranger something they’ll remember for the rest of their life.
I’ve never worked in one, but I did spend many idle childhood hours in a fine dining kitchen.
For a short three years, my father owned a restaurant serving haute cuisine, which often doubled as my personal after-school daycare.
After a long day of failing to grasp mathematics, I would watch with wonder in my eyes as the cooks rushed around in their spotless chef whites, reducing demi-glace or making tomato concassé.
It was a ragtag crew: the head chef was a balding Chinese man, his sous chef an older, soft-spoken Indian gentleman.
One of the line cooks was a Bangladeshi guy with little to no command of English, but he made madeleines better than anyone else.
The maître d’ was skinny, looked like the Grim Reaper, and always smelled like cigarettes. I never saw him in anything other than a blazer and a tailored shirt, even when he occasionally picked me up from school.
The menu changed every day. Sautéed potato-and-onion ice cream, topped with caviar and a potato chip. Pan-seared foie gras in Madeira sauce. Torched scallops with white truffles.
I was lucky enough to eat a staff meal sometimes; on one occasion, it was Cabernet-braised beef cheek left over from the night before. For a 10-year-old, it was like Christmas had come early.
It wasn’t Christmas magic with Santa and a factory of elves. It was hard work.
Grit. Standards. Devotion to something bigger than themselves. In service of the restaurant, they found something to work towards, and a standard they collectively agreed to hold each other to.
The restaurant didn’t survive, like many others before and since. But the standard those kitchens instilled outlived the buildings.
It went wherever the cooks went next, and it’s the same today, in the kitchens of Kuala Lumpur’s top restaurants.
We are applauding the death of that format like it’s a correction against elitism, but what’s at risk of disappearing along with it is the rigorous training ground that raised the technical ceiling for our restaurant landscape as a whole.
Every casual, ambitious kitchen we now celebrate instead — the ones plating serious food without the tablecloths, the ones we point to as proof that fine dining was never necessary — exists because someone in that kitchen trained somewhere that demanded more of them than “good enough.”
Kill the format without reckoning with that, and you risk losing the standard-bearing that’s fuelling the very cooking we claim to prefer instead.
By the end of The Bear, Richie — a man who spent years insisting he had no business being in a fine dining kitchen at all — finally understands what the standard was for.
Not the abuse, or the shouting. It was that the work matters — that somewhere in it is the chance to make someone’s night.
My father’s restaurant is long gone. So, probably, is the version of fine dining that produced it.
The format, at least, deserves whatever’s coming to it. But there are a million Richies out there, still looking for somewhere to belong, still hoping someone will demand more of them than they thought they had.
I just don’t know where they’re supposed to find that once we’ve finished celebrating the death of every place that would have taught them.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
* Find Ethan Lau on Instagram here.
