Sizzling kitchen drama The Bear is spicing up the dating game for chefs
On the back of the hottest show on TV with Carmen and co, cooks are in the mix for dating app matches and saucy DMs. Hannah Crosbie finds the way to a person’s heart is through their stomach
We truly live in a post-Bear society. The show exploded onto the small screen just over a year ago; screaming, swearing and on fire. It followed the successes of similarly pube-straighteningly tense kitchen dramas such as Boiling Point, with scripts and situations so realistic I know ex-chefs, too traumatised by their own experiences, who refuse to watch more than one episode.
Everyone else can’t get enough of it. The relentless pace, the doomed relationships, the tomato sauce-stained jeopardy. There’s no doubt it makes for romantic watching but with little to no scenes of intimacy, it’s curious to see just how many people are now thirsting after chefs. Until quite recently, this was an occupation associated with antisocial hours and substance abuse issues, and not one to be seriously considered by a potential romantic partner.
As I’m endlessly fascinated with how pop culture can shape and skew perceptions of the industry I love, I spoke to several chefs about exactly how The Bear has affected their dating lives.
I begin with one of my favourite people in the world: a chef called Angus. He first started cheffing to support a law degree and quickly rose up through the ranks. He completed his studies but decided to stay in kitchens. Moving to east London, he traded in his three-piece suit and tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses for an array of tattoos, a septum piercing and a mullet. He also resolved to become, as his Twitter bio reads, a “certified fat f***”, and now works at cult (and personal) favourite FKA Black Axe Mangal.
I hope I’ve painted a sufficient picture, but in case there’s any doubt, Angus’s attractiveness is wonderfully unconventional. People that look like him are not often celebrated in traditional media, even less so his female counterparts. He’s received a decent, but no more than average, amount of likes and swipe rights on dating apps in his time, but now he tells me he’s getting daily DMs, all from people interested in him for his profession.
Angus came out of a long-term relationship after the debut of The Bear’s first season, and immediately noticed a shift in how he was being romantically approached. “There’s now a mainstream fascination with my career that there just hasn’t been before,” Angus laughs. “Matches now open with ‘I’m looking for someone with line chef energy’ or ‘it’s giving The Bear’. It’s honestly still a bit of a shock that people are also openly interested in physical features that I faced stick for growing up. For previous partners, it was just a fun novelty that I could cook. Now, just about every date I go on has people asking me about my job. It’s because they’ve built this sexy image in the media.”
Esmerelda, who worked as a pastry chef but has just switched to front of house, has garnered similarly flirty messages following The Bear’s debut. “I’ve had ‘I love a woman in uniform’, even ‘will you say yes chef in bed’,” she recalls. “There’s such a perceived sexual appeal of chefs with our burns, our scars, our military-adjacent personalities, especially if you’re a woman.”
This makes me curious: do female chefs receive the same amount of adoration and attention? I message my friend Rahel Stephanie, chef and founder of the supper club Spoons, to see if she’s experienced any change in tone from potential beaus post-Bear. She gladly sends me some amusing screenshots. It’s always fun to read thirsty messages, but these definitely strike a different chord to Angus’s romantic DMs. I read messages from guys asking Rahel to make them chubby, fetishising her as a maternal cook, rather than a skilled chef who brandishes knives and sells out supper clubs.
“It’s interesting to see how increasingly people have been romanticising chefs, particularly female chefs like me,” Rahel says. “But there’s definitely quite a bit of cis-gender-based stereotyping going on. Men are romanticising female chefs for their nurturing qualities. But then you also have women fetishising male chefs as ‘chef daddies’. It reduces everyone to cliched gender roles.”
Angus agrees: “The boys are definitely the ones benefiting from the new ‘sexy chef’ character. None of the thirst directed at The Bear has been for any of the women.” He makes a good point: I’ve never seen so much as a fancam of the series’ female protagonist Sydney, who, come to think of it, spends more time in the kitchen than Carmen does. It’s the millennia-old double standard. When women cook, it’s expected. When men cook, it’s a spectacle.
“Chef daddies” is a nod to the recent article written by anonymous Instagram account Slutty Cheff. After going viral for posting a scathing roast of TikToker-turned-restauranteur Thomas Straker’s painfully non-diverse staff photo, she wrote a piece on the death of the chef daddy – a strongly sexualised male archetype that dominates social media – and how sick she is of seeing this tired, toxic brand of man being fawned over. “In fact,” she suggests in the opening paragraph, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the media hype over this type of chef is what encouraged Straker to post that weird cricket-porn pic in the first place.”
The symbol of the talented, bad boy chef is hardly a new one. Just watch your great aunt’s eyes light up as Gino D’Acampo fries lardons on This Morning. Google Marco Pierre White to recover archival photography where food + cooking = sex. I do so, and flick through furrowed brows, roll-up cigarettes, hirsute arms clutching cleavers, pouting women leaning over the pass as Marco plates up food.
“It’s just not cool to be an arsehole anymore,” Angus reflects. “Nobody in their right mind would be romantically interested in some miserable 38-year-old chef who smokes 20 cigarettes a night and bullies their 19-year-old commis chefs. Take the way that Will Poulter plays his cameo in the latest season of The Bear. That softly spoken authority is so much sexier than some bitter old dude screaming his head off because someone left a lemon pip in their velouté.” (Note: Angus was one of the chefs who trained Poulter for the series.)
This toxic archetype seems to be, thankfully, on its way out, but a lust for chefs clearly endures. Perhaps it stems from a human desire to be looked after, to watch someone create something beautiful and delicious – and it’s not entirely unreasonable to want that from someone vulnerable and compassionate, without a breaktime crack habit. For this reason, I don’t think the sexy chef is going away anytime soon, although as someone who works in kitchens, Esmerelda has had quite enough. “I do hope this bubble bursts,” she laughs. “It’s just a job for f***’s sake.”
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