FX’s The Bear aired its fourth season on June 25 and will be returning for a fifth sometime next year. Even though Season 5 is still a ways away, expectations are already sky-high for the culinary dramedy. As an avid viewer, I certainly have a list of hopes for the next season, but at the very top sits one humble request: please let Carmy finally discover that he cooked Sydney’s favorite meal!
The Bear debuted in 2022, and its pilot episode, “System,” sees Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy meet Ayo Edebiri’s Sydney when the latter responds to an ad for a sous chef at Carmy’s late brother Mikey’s (Jon Bernthal) beef sandwich shop, The Beef. In this first interaction, we learn that Sydney is aware of Carmy’s culinary accomplishments—”I know who you are,” she admits. “You’re the most excellent CDC at the most excellent restaurant in the entire United States of America.”—but claims she chose to work at The Beef simply because of her father’s affection for the restaurant.
It’s only much later, in the Season 1 finale, “Braciole,” that we uncover Sydney’s true intentions for seeking out The Beef. In this episode, Sydney commiserates with Marcus (Lionel Boyce), The Beef’s baker and second staffer—along with Sydney—to have a falling out with an explosive Carmy in the preceding episode, “Review.” In Sydney’s case, she and Carmy’s fight led to her quitting The Beef, and in the finale, she prepares a friendly meal for Marcus as they discuss next steps.
While cooking, Sydney mentions the New York food tour she took after culinary school and reveals to Marcus that one of the restaurants she ate at produced the best meal of her life. Marcus wants to know what the meal was, but Sydney gets distracted with the dish she’s preparing and doesn’t answer. When the conversation circles back around several minutes later, Sydney initially doesn’t know what Marcus is talking about. “Wait, so, what was the best one?” he asks again, to which Sydney replies, “Best what?” and Marcus clarifies, “Best meal you ever had.”
Sydney takes a moment to respond. When she does, she reveals–rather reluctantly–that the best meal of her life was the one Carmy prepared. “I knew it. I knew it,” Marcus says gleefully. Sydney, sounding even more resigned now, concedes that yes, Carmy is “really, really, really good…but he’s still a little bitch.”
With this new information, we retroactively understand why Sydney actually chose to work at a beef sandwich shop instead of one of Chicago’s many fine dining establishments. She experienced the best meal of her life thanks to Carmy, and this in turn makes him the chef she most wants to learn from, so if that means preparing beef sandwiches instead of beef tenderloin, then so be it.
While Sydney doesn’t elaborate on the restaurant or the meal itself during “Braciole,” we revisit this pivotal moment in Season 3’s premiere, “Tomorrow.” In a Carmy-centric episode largely told through disjointed flashbacks, we see Carmy working at Empire, a fictional New York City Michelin-starred restaurant run by Joel McHale’s particularly unsavory Executive Chef David Fields. Carmy is Chef David’s CDC, or Chef de Cuisine, and we quickly understand why present-day Carmy cites this man as the primary source of his culinary-based trauma.
At Empire, Carmy experiments with a hamachi, or young yellowtail fish, entrée that Chef David then steals and modifies, much to Carmy’s chagrin. Carmy is suffering through preparing this inferior version of his dish when he receives the news that his brother has taken his own life. In the show’s timeline, this event transpires four months prior to the Season 1 premiere.
In another flashback, Carmy is once again in the kitchen at Empire, presumably only a few minutes after finding out about Mikey’s death. In any high-end restaurant, but especially Chef David’s Empire, there’s no time for Carmy to properly process this magnitude of loss. Instead, he resumes plating the bastardized hamachi dish in a display of either compartmentalization or complete dissociation.
He’s about to add the fennel sauce—a Chef David decision—to yet another plate when he suddenly pauses and reconsiders the untouched paupiette of hamachi in front of him, still awaiting its other components. At this moment, Carmy decides to go rogue.
In what might be a silent protest, or an act of defiance, or even simply an attempt to regain control when everything else in his life feels out of control, especially in light of Mikey’s death, Carmy opts to plate this one particular dish as he originally intended. This means using different garnishes and a blood orange sauce instead of a fennel one, a substitution he justifies to the server with a simple, falsified “It’s a fennel allergy. Sub blood orange.”
We follow this modified dish out into the dining room, departing from Carmy’s point-of-view for the first time in one of these flashbacks, and watch as it’s delivered to an unsuspecting patron.
And who might this lucky diner be, you ask?
It’s Sydney, of course, in the midst of her aforementioned New York food tour. Suddenly, we’ve been granted additional context for her Season 1 conversation with Marcus, and it’s pretty monumental. As viewers, we now understand that not only was Sydney’s favorite meal an exclusive variation that no other Empire diner ever received, but it was also a variation that only existed because Carmy was grappling with the immediate aftermath of Mikey’s death.
Some skeptics might chalk this whole situation up to a coincidence, but I think there’s far more at play here. As someone who was so stunned by this reveal while watching the episode that I shot up off my couch and leaned towards the TV screen in awe, and who considers this moment to be the undeniable highlight of Season 3, I’m inclined to believe that this deliberate choice to divinely link the best meal of Sydney’s life to the worst day of Carmy’s life is leading to something big for their relationship. The implications of this cosmic connection are so narratively enticing—Sydney entered Carmy’s life right as Mikey exited it—that I would genuinely be shocked if The Bear fails to resolve this particular plot point.
Which brings me to the most recent season, and the third time this special meal is addressed on the show. In the Season 4 episode “Bears,” Sydney once again mentions this meal during a conversation she has with Carmy’s estranged mother, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis), at a wedding.
Donna, having been out of Carmy’s life for several years at this point, is eager to hear about her son from his friend and coworker, and Sydney is happy to oblige. Among the anecdotes she shares with Donna is, of course, the fact that the best meal of her life was one that Carmy prepared, but she admits that she’s not actually sure if Carmy knows this. As viewers, we’re aware that Carmy remains in the dark, because Sydney has only ever mentioned this meal—and not even the specifics of it, just its existence—to two people onscreen, and neither of them has been Carmy.
When I watched this scene in “Bears,” I immediately interpreted it as the show deliberately reminding us that Sydney and Carmy have this fateful connection, and, crucially, that Carmy still doesn’t know about it. If we add in the context from the Season 3 flashback and remember that Sydney also doesn’t know the full story, we realize that there are actually discoveries to be made by both parties, and no one can facilitate these except for Sydney and Carmy themselves.
Carmy won’t hear about Sydney’s favorite meal from Marcus or Donna, simply because neither of them know what the meal actually was—they just know that Carmy cooked it. Similarly, there’s no chance of Sydney finding out about the timing of her meal in relation to Mikey’s death from anyone other than Carmy himself—not even Carmy’s sister, Natalie (Abby Elliott), who called him with the news, is privy to the specifics of this one moment in Empire’s kitchen.
Simply put, only Sydney can disclose to Carmy what meal she ate and how it affected her, and only Carmy can fill Sydney in on the circumstances surrounding this special meal.
All of this means that these two are due for a pivotal conversation, and I’m hoping it happens in Season 5. From a storytelling perspective, both characters should make their discoveries before the series ends, because otherwise, why introduce this plot point at all? Why present an intriguing concept that affects your two leads, expand on it to make it even more compelling, and then briefly revisit it nearly two seasons later if you have no intention of ever providing it with a meaningful and satisfying resolution?
I’ve always considered The Bear to be a high-quality, well-written show, which is why I have faith that Sydney’s favorite meal—and all of its implications—will be paid off in some fashion at some point. I trust that the show has been planting these seeds intentionally, and I would love to see them bloom next season—especially since it remains to be seen if it will be The Bear’s last.
I’m a fan of both The Bear and the bond it has established between its two leads over the last four seasons—and yes, I’m also someone who hopes said bond could eventually become romantic—so receiving the pay off for Sydney’s “blood orange hamachi of fate,” as I like to call it, is my primary ask for Season 5.
I want to see how Sydney reacts to finding out that she was the only person who was ever served her favorite meal. I want to know how Carmy feels about having inadvertently prepared the all-time best meal for someone who has since become an incredibly important part of his life. I want to understand how it affects Sydney to learn that her favorite meal was prepared by Carmy right after Mikey died.
More than anything, I want to see Sydney and Carmy discover the true extent of their connection and then consider what this means for their relationship going forward.
In a show that has focused on these two chefs since the very beginning, is some narrative resolution really too much to ask?
Now streaming on Hulu: What are your thoughts on the significance of Sydney’s best meal being Carmy’s? Let us know in the comments below.
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