'The Bear' Season 2's Chocolate Banana, Taylor Swift References and More, Explained

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. Whether you’re taking an important call, listening to your favorite song or intently streaming the finale to the show you’ve been binging, good audio can only enhance your listening experience.

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The Bear‘s second season places us in a frigid Chicago winter, where our beloved, stressed chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and his crew are hard at work turning their now-shuttered sandwich joint “The Beef” into “The Bear,” an upscale dining destination.The second season of Hulu’s surprise hit from Christopher Storer (Eighth Grade, Ramy) proves that without change, even the most timeless meals can go off.

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Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. In “The Bear,” whose second season returned to Hulu last week, no prop is more significant than each chef’s respective knife. For a series known for showcasing the very real highs and exceptionally difficult lows inside the restaurant industry, getting the tool that every chef needs just right was imperative. Take Carmy’s $2,000-plus Japanese steel knife, for example, that subtly hints for the first time at the tortured chef’s history working in fine dining restaurants, which he so bashfully tries to hide. “We wanted him to have one thing that wasn’t pedestrian because he had already gone to New York, he had already gotten that James Beard Award,” the show’s prop master Laura Roeper tells Variety. “It’s from the Japanese Knives of Beverly Hills. They’re super famous, people know them.”

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Selome Hailu “The Bear” became an overnight sensation when its first season debuted in 2022 because of its visceral honesty about how it looks and feels to work in a restaurant. Much of the credit for that belongs to Courtney Storer. Storer, sister of series creator Chris Storer, has worked in high-profile kitchens from Verjus in Paris to Jon & Vinny’s in L.A., but her most recent job has been to serve as “The Bear’s” culinary producer, getting the writers, cast and crew acclimated to the world the series takes place in. “In Season 1, it was it was a lot of storytelling with the writers, but also providing my journals and different training guides to give insight into the ethos of restaurants,” Storer says. “It’s bigger than the conflicts: It’s the decision-making, the structure, the procedures, the recipes.”

Emily Longeretta Just as it did in its first season, “The Bear” Season 2 created a powerful soundtrack, thanks to executive producers Josh Senior and Christopher Storer, who also oversee the series’ music. From Otis Redding and Pearl Jam, to R.E.M. and Taylor Swift, the duo were able to tell a story of itself through the needle drops — something that is just as important to them as the writing itself. When the writers room began, the group made a playlist and started sharing ideas with others on the team and even some of the actors, with Senior noting that Ayo Edebiri “is super helpful” in the entire process. “It’s the most fun thing we get to do on the show, in my opinion. It’s a blast,” says Senior. “Sometimes we take all the songs out and see if we miss them. Other times, we use the songs to syncopate the scenes and cut them really fast. It’s an integral part of the process. We don’t score the show after it’s cut.”

Selome Hailu Though production on Season 2 of “The Bear” was well underway before Ramy Youssef traveled to Copenhagen to direct the fourth episode, series creator Chris Storer was slow to bring him fully behind the curtain. “He didn’t let me watch anything they had shot [in the first three episodes]. He was like, ‘No, no. You can see it when you come back, but just make this what you think it should be,'” Youssef remembers. Youssef is the first and only person to serve as a director on “The Bear” besides Storer and his co-showrunner Joanna Calo. When a tight production timeline made it impossible for Storer or Calo to direct in Copenhagen on top of nine Chicago-set episodes, Youssef was Storer’s first choice. Storer has been a director and executive producer on Youssef’s Hulu series “Ramy” since its 2019 debut, and had bounced ideas for “The Bear” off of him since “way back when it was a movie idea.”

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EXCLUSIVE: As his series creation The Bear turned in record Season Two ratings for Hulu, Christopher Storer is set to direct at Paramount Pictures The Winter of Frankie Machine, an adaptation of the 2006 Don Winslow novel. The film will be produced by Shane Salerno and The Story Factory, and Storer will use the Brian Koppelman & David Levien draft those writers did when Martin Scorsese was going to direct Robert De Niro in the lead role.

, FX's acclaimed dramedy about a fine-dining chef who takes over his late brother's failing Chicago sandwich shop, has returned with a stellar — and even more delicious — season 2. Adding to all the excitement and drama in the new episodes are a number of previously unannounced guest stars, from Jamie Lee Curtis to John Mulaney to Oliva Colman, who all make unexpected — but very notable — appearances throughout. Created by Christopher Storer, stars Jeremy Allen White as Carmy, the put-upon chef who returned home in the wake of his brother, Michael's (Jon Bernthal), suicide.

Yes, chef. Things are heating up for Season 2 of FX’s The Bear on Hulu.

Sophia Scorziello editor “The Bear” Season 2 showed that there can never be too many cameo cooks in the kitchen. From Jamie Lee Curtis starring as Jeremy Allen White’s frenzied mom to Will Poulter as a chef in Copenhagen and even the Sarah Paulson-John Mulaney power couple, there’s surely no shortage of stars in this season of FX’s restaurant dramedy. Jamie Lee Curtis surprised audiences as Donna Berzatto, mother to Carmy, Mikey and Sugar, who is introduced in a flashback of a frenzied Christmas Eve dinner.

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Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic On the second season of “The Bear,” FX’s breakout restaurant drama, each character gets a moment to shine. But few seize it with quite such abandon as Richie. As played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Richie spent much of the first season at top volume and vein-popping intensity, perennially there to remind Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) of the chaos in the restaurant’s kitchen, and to add to it. Which makes him an unlikely candidate to train, for a period, at a true fine-dining restaurant, but so he does. Much as Marcus (Lionel Boyce) flies to Copenhagen to apprentice as a high-level pastry chef, so too does Richie “stage” in an upscale Chicago this show hadn’t yet shown us, so that he may learn the essentials of service.

Sophia Scorziello editor Chris Zucchero, owner of Chicago’s beloved Italian sandwich shop Mr. Beef, is on the “L” trying to get a word in on the phone. He just wrapped up a long two days of catering parties for FX’s “The Bear” Season 2, providing hot Italian beef sandwiches with sweet peppers and spicy giardiniera for Hollywood’s finest. “The Bear” creator Christopher Storer — who Zucchero has been friends with since kindergarten — based “The Bear” on the classic establishment and shot about 90% of the pilot in Mr. Beef. Storer even cast Zucchero in the pilot as the guy in the parking lot who deals meat to Jeremy Allen White’s character Carmy.