Hey, it’s just an omelet, a friend said recently. We were talking about FX’s hit series “The Bear,” and a scene late in its second season when a chef made an omelet for a weary, and very pregnant, restaurant manager.
The first bite loosened her posture and slackened the muscles in her face. You could see the relief, the joy, the gratitude that is specific to being fed or, more to the point, being cooked for at exactly the right moment.
It’s not an accident the moment involved eggs. Nor that the “The Bear’s” omelet went viral, with home-cooked versions popping up round the country.
Just an omelet?
No, there’s a reason the humble (sublime?) dish inspired thousands of copycats while the show’s “elevated” dishes have not, at least not to the same scale, though the “employee meal” spaghetti from the first season had its supporters, too.
I used to make omelets for a living. The joy came when I could see the look on the face of a customer eating one. The most gratifying omelets I cooked came after-hours, when an exhausted server couldn’t think of what to eat, say, or at home, whipped up for a visiting friend or family member.
Sometimes, my omelets were, admittedly, loosely shaped scrambled eggs, and while the omelet on “The Bear” is a nod to its importance in French cooking, it needn’t be to do its job. Almost any kind of cooked egg, when made by the hand of another, can lift the spirit at the right time.
Jim Leyland, the former Detroit Tigers manager, once ate a plate of over easy eggs while lying on the couch in the manager’s office at Comerica Park. It was early, a weekend morning, as I recall, and he was dressed in long underwear.
The Tigers had played the night before. He was tired. He was hungry. And when he’d take a bite, he’d slide the eggs off the plate and into his mouth, barely lifting his head.
I saw him do this on the road occasionally, too: a heavy-lidded manager in search of a boost. Usually, the eggs arrived fried in oil, a tap of salt and pepper on top. With each bite, thanks to the cooking of someone in the clubhouse, Leyland would roust back to life.
Who among us hasn’t had someone make us the simplest of egg dishes when we need it most?
Soft-boiled and warm in the shell, perhaps, prepared by the hands of a mother. Or fried hard and doused in jarred picante at the hand of a father. Even the rubbery, scrambled mess pooling in its own water in a buffet tray under a heat lamp has its place … and purpose.
Someone took the time to make those, too, and I’ve always been grateful for the protein punch after a short night at a distant hotel on a long road trip. I ate such eggs more than once, I’ll confess, probably before heading to a baseball stadium to chat with a tired manager.
The viral eggs of “The Bear” symbolize, among other things, what it means to make a plate of food for someone else, and especially for someone you love. And while the TV series is nominally about a chef and a restaurant, it resonates because of its ensemble, the vulnerability and messiness of its ensemble, and the ensemble’s relationship to food as each character searches for purpose, a sense of self, of place, of limits; few things expose your innerworkings like a heated and tense professional kitchen.
The show is both chaotic and still, loud and cotton quiet. It bellows rage one moment and shares a cigarette the next, from one mouth to another, always hunting human connection. Together, they aim for a Michelin star.
A few of the episodes have become their own critically celebrated testimonials, to sojourns far and near, to the minefield of a holiday family dinner. Yet as thrilling as “Honeydew,” “Fishes,” and “Forks,” are to watch and absorb, the show, and its central theme, is best explained with a few eggs.
Eggs that Sydney Adamu, the sous chef, transforms for Natalie Berzatto, the pregnant restaurant manager, in the penultimate episode of season 2, which dropped last month on Hulu.
Berzatto, known as “Sugar,” initially turns down the offer of Adamu’s cooking because she’s so tired she can’t think. Eventually, she relents and softly asks for an omelet. Adamu, played by Ayo Edebiri, grabs a few ingredients and begins by cracking three eggs into a sieve resting over a bowl, whisking them, then gently pushing them through the mesh.
Free of the random flotsam sometimes attached to the yolk or suspended in the whites, she pours the eggs into a non-stick pan that’s been coated in a couple tablespoons of butter. The eggs gently sizzle, but don’t crackle, as browning is the enemy in this French-leaning preparation.
Once the eggs begin to set, Adamu pulls back a third of the forming omelet and drops more butter in the pan, then spreads them out again. She uses a pastry bag to pipe a line of Boursin on the outer third before carefully rolling the silken eggs into their final omelet form.
After slipping it onto a plate, she dabs the top with more butter, sprinkles finely chopped chives and crumbled sour cream and onion potato chips on top, grinds a bit of pepper and places the plate on a breakfast-in-bed style tray; she completes the meal – and presentation – by sinking a splash of fresh beet juice into a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice.
No dialogue interrupts the scene. There is no soundtrack. Just the ambient sound of Adamu’s cracking and whisking and whisper frying, an act of meditation, an act of love. The viewer is meant to hear it as well as witness it.
The payoff arrives when Adamu sets the tray before Berzatto, who is sitting in her cramped office. She lifts the fork and takes a bite and immediately closes her eyes.
“I could cry …” she finally says, “… thank you.”
She stands and hugs Adamu, then tells her half-jokingly, “don’t watch me eat.” Adamu nods and backs out of the office, smiling.
It’s as intimate a television scene as you’ll find, because it captures the intimacy we seek and find through food by the daily, and through feeding one another in any number of ways, from serving runny eggs to a manager chilling in long underwear in a clubhouse office to scrambling them for a hungry teenager to dropping them unshelled in boiling water and pulling them before the yolks are completely set and serving them with a piece of toast and a tiny spoon for a 6 year old.
Those memories are in the bones. Sometimes all it takes is an omelet to unlock them.
Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.