“I don’t need to receive any amusement or enjoyment,” Carmen “Carmy” Barzotto said as The Bear’s second season finale hurtled toward its conclusion. “And I’m completely fine with that.” Locked in his restaurant’s walk-in refrigerator, the chef, played by Jeremy Allen White, seemed poised to cut everything but work from his life. It was a self-flagellating tantrum even as Carmy’s restaurant enjoyed its triumphant friends and family opening, but according to White, Carmy will remain true to that vow of asceticism, as the show’s third season will spend the majority of its time in the kitchen.
It’s been a while since we’ve seen our friends from the restaurant formerly known as The Original Beef of Chicagoland. (Or “The Berf,” if you’re feeling nasty.) FX dropped the acclaimed show’s second season in one big Hulu binge on June 22, then made us wait until November before confirming its return for season three.
The network announced that White, Ayo Edebiri (Carmy’s fellow chef, Sydney Adamu), and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (the newly be-suited Richard “Richie” Jerimovich) will indeed return to the series, but has provided few other details so far. But on an episode of the Just for Variety podcast released Saturday, White offered an intriguing peek at what viewers can expect.
“I think they’ve written a couple scripts,” White told interviewer Marc Malkin of the show, but “I have not read any.”
“I do know in January I’m going to spend a fair amount of time getting together with some chefs,” White said. “And I know that I’m going to start putting together [the titular restaurant’s] menu with different chefs and cooking and just trying to get prepared to do more of that stuff on camera.”
Much of the second season dealt with the nuts and bolts work of remodeling a restaurant, along with personal side plots fleshing out other characters’ lives, the dysfunction of the Barzotto family, and Carmy’s attempts to escape that dysfunction with girlfriend Claire (Molly Gordon). White acknowledges that “for the second season, so much of it was about putting the restaurant together, so there wasn’t much cooking,” a state of affairs that might have caused White-like Carmy, per his refrigerated rant—to lose his fine dining edge.
“We all did a lot of preparation before the first season,” White told Malkin, a rigorous training he also detailed to Vanity Fair last year. “I went to culinary school, and I spent a lot of time in restaurants and stuff.”
“But now, in the third season, I think we’re going to go back to that functioning kitchen atmosphere that we had in the first,” White said. Some might pause at his use of “functioning” given his character’s opening-night meltdown, Sydney’s back alley vomit session, and Josh’s (Alex Moffat) service-shift crack session, but, sure, I see what he means.
FX has yet to say when the third season will drop on Hulu (or Star+ in Latin America and Disney+ everywhere outside the US), but promises a premiere in 2024. Until then, you can get your White fix from wrestling biopic The Iron Claw, see Edebiri in the December 1 release The Sweet East, and hear Moss-Bachrach in Possession, a podcast that dropped on Audible this fall.
