This post contains spoilers for the third season of The Bear , which is now streaming in its entirety on Hulu. But the significant spoilers won’t come for a while, and you’ll get another warning first. The Season Three premiere of FX’s The Bear flashes back to all the kitchens where Carmy ( Jeremy Allen White ) worked before the start of the series, including the New York restaurant run by the brilliant, abusive David Fields (Joel McHale).
In one scene, Fields samples a new dish Carmy has designed, and derisively compares it to nachos because it contains too many ingredients. He grabs a piece of green tape and scrawls out a simple piece of advice for his emotionally battered protege: “SUBTRACT.” It’s a lesson that we see Carmy struggle with in the show’s present-day action.
At times, he’s acutely conscious of when a dish, or his restaurant as a whole, is trying to do too much at once, and often cautions his own wounded disciple Sydney ( Ayo Edebiri ) that less can be more. Yet among the first big decisions he makes in the third season is that he and Sydney will change their entire menu every night, rather than tinkering with what they know already works, and occasionally swapping new dishes in for old ones. Sydney rightly questions why he would want to do this, since the titular Bear is so new and fragile, and since the friends and family opening with the menu they devised together was such a triumph.
(Well, the menu was, at least.) Carmy replies, “So they c.
