Richie Jerimovich is a central character of The Bear, masterfully portrayed by Ebon-Moss Bachrach. Though he fits perfectly in the intense, high-energy ensemble, his loud and offensive hostility make him perhaps the most unlikable character of the first season. And yet, it’s hard to dislike him entirely, even as he offends and complicates the lives of everyone else working at The Beef.
In season one, Richie’s story is painted by grief for many reasons: the death of his best friend, Michael (Jon Bernthal) and Richie’s guilt at his inability to help him, Richie’s failed marriage and the loss of a family structure he craved. And then, there’s the restaurant that has been a constant for him, one last anchor tying him to Michael, which is changing faster than he can make sense of. But at least, The Beef was still The Beef. They still made their staple foods, even if Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) and Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) had begun to introduce things like the brigade system and off-menu risottos. It still looked the same, even if they insisted on keeping it cleaner, and it still needed Richie, if less, if it disapproved of his methods and his unagreeable and often disrespectful personality.
Even as a loud mess of a man who is all too comfortable with spouting offensive language and waving a gun around, it’s hard not to see something more in Richie: something that might be what convinces Carmy (and Michael, when he was alive) to keep him around. Something that they externalize as a family tie, calling each other cousin despite not being actually related, something that we don’t understand just yet, not in season one, but that makes us feel like he’s worth not giving up on. It’s hard to pinpoint what it is exactly that still makes us root for him, especially when we still know so little about him. In fact, The Bear favors an organic type of storytelling which allows us to meet and discover the characters as we would someone we met in real life: hints of more are dropped in conversations, in facial expressions, in movements, and slowly — rather than with a straightforward backstory — we learn what lies beneath the surface.
By the end of the first season, the viewer feels as if they both know Richie perfectly and also don’t know him at all, which we can assume to be the case for many of the people in his life.
Richie is lost at the start of season two. The restaurant he knows is gone and it’s being molded into something unrecognizable, something that might have no use for him. Something that, if anything, he would weigh down by being the man that he is. As The Bear, the restaurant, takes shape, Richie wonders about his purpose. He’s a burden, he’s not the sort of fancy chef or server they need in the place that they’re creating. What’s more, the only thing Richie can truly help with — fixing up the place with Fak (Matty Matheson) — is revealing problem after problem after problem, and more times than not, he needs to emasculate himself and turn to Natalie (Abby Elliot) for help.
In the sixth episode of the season, Fishes, we gain precious insight into the Berzatto family dynamics, which of course includes honorary Berzattos, Fak, and Richie. In what might be one of the sweetest and most poignant scenes of the show, Richie takes a quiet few minutes with his pregnant wife, Tiff (Gillian Jacobs), in the midst of all the chaos. He is softer and gentler than we have ever seen him, and we get a glimpse of the love that drives him, as well as what he has lost because of his divorce and Michael’s passing.
After Fishes comes Forks, a Richie-centric episode, though it opens with a sequence of Sydney testing some food for the menu of The Bear as she watches a Coach K video, which, as well as relating to Sydney’s journey to being a leader, also sums up the crux of what this episode is about. “You’re not gonna get there alone,” Coach K says. “Be on a team. Surround yourself with good people and learn how to listen.” And indeed, this is what Richie will learn in the next half hour of television.
In Forks, Richie is sent by Carmy to be a stage for a week at a three star restaurant, an assignment that he thinks of as a punishment, as shown by him whispering, “Fuck you, cousin,” before stepping inside on his first day. Richie’s entrance into the dark, empty restaurant is set to slow, discordant and unsettling music, with a horror-like quality to it: he does not belong here, in a perfectly neat upscale restaurant where people get yelled at for a smudge. He’s a fish out of water, who favors T-shirts and dirty aprons and yells in the front of house.
Garrett (Andrew Lopez), the waiter he’s assigned to for the week, greets him with a simple, “Forks.” This being Richie’s assignment for the week: shining forks; if he’s lucky, he might upgrade to spoons. In true Richie fashion, he does not take anything in stride. He is his vulgar disrespectful self until Garrett takes him outside of the restaurant to reprimand him. Richie enters the conversation with his typical hostility, but as Garrett tells him that he does this job out of love and requests respect from him, Richie is visibly listening. Notably, Garrett doesn’t simply tell Richie to respect him, the staff and the diners; he also tells him he needs to respect himself. That’s the crux of it: Richie doesn’t respect or love himself, and that lack of regard for himself translates into how he treats everyone and everything else, and how he allows himself to be treated.
After this talk, Richie’s demeanor changes: he starts to ask questions and learns to listen, he wakes up earlier each morning, he shines forks more carefully, and he’s unequivocally excited when he’s told to change into a suit, an exchange that is shown through intense camerawork and action-movie-esque music. This is our hero coming into his own, being handed his armor and welcomed into the ranks of upscale hospitality workers. He observes carefully, asks a myriad of questions and he loves it. He’s still Richie, loud and vulgar, but this time, it’s out of excitement. It’s out of love. When he interacts with clients, he doesn’t put on a persona: he is himself, charming in his unrefined ways, polite in his overt friendliness.
This is a love story. Richie has fallen in love with hospitality, with what Garrett explains to him are acts of service. He seems to never have considered this part of the restaurant industry. He never felt the love and interest that Carmy, Syd or Marcus (Lionel Boyce) feel towards food and its preparation, but this, making someone’s day by serving them something they’ve never tasted before, improving their meal with just the right quip, figuring out just what they want and giving it to them — this, he loves. This gives him purpose.
The love story between Richie and his job, as well as his coworkers and the people he serves, is not the only thread of love in this episode: another fundamental part of it is his family. During his stage, Tiff calls him to tell him she’s engaged. As his ex-wife tells him about her upcoming wedding to another man, Richie is still wearing his wedding ring. That’s the thing about Richie: he’s been stuck. Stuck in a world where Michael was alive and lost in a world without him, stuck in an old malfunctioning restaurant that’s now closed, stuck in a family dynamic that no longer exists. But the love exists, and that still matters. The moment in which Richie receives this news is fundamental: finally, for the first time in years, he’s learning to be okay with things changing, so when Tiff reassures Richie that things won’t change between them, though it’s obvious that they will, he’s upset, but not as broken as he might have been had he found out a week before. A man who has worn the same shirt in different colors for years — and occasionally with a printing error — puts on a suit that feels like armor and comes alive.
After his first night of service comes the undoubted climax of the episode: Richie drives home to the tune of Taylor Swift’s Love Story. Taylor Swift, his daughter’s favorite singer, and likely Tiff’s, as shown by her wearing a 1989 shirt in the previous episode and being offered a ticket to her concert by Richie in this one. Have we ever seen him smile as purely as he does in this scene, or freely sing along to music like this? Have we ever seen him this alive before, so at ease with being exactly who he is, wrong lyrics and all?
That is the last and most important level of this love story: Richie Jerimovich falls in love with himself. He does what Garrett asked of him: he learns to respect himself. He cleans his house and hangs his daughter’s art on the fridge, he reads Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara and excitedly annotates it. He starts to wear suits. On the last day of his stage, he expresses a wish to stay, and the feeling is returned. When he showed people respect and love, they respected and loved him right back; and in the following episodes, he’ll apply this lesson to the staff of The Bear and finally become a real part of the team, with everything he has to offer and everything he has to learn.
The last scene of the episode introduces us to Chef Terry, played by the amazing Olivia Coleman. She’s peeling mushrooms, first thing in the morning, a small thing that shows people she cares. “Time spent doing this is time well spent,” she says, and Richie truly considers this as he follows her guidance to peel a couple mushrooms of his own. She tells him of her experience opening the restaurant: she had tried once before and failed miserably, and then, on her 38th birthday, as if by chance, she found this place. “Like a never too late kinda thing,” Richie deems it, allowing himself a hope he’d previously banished.
And finally, Chef Terry tells him exactly what Carmy thinks of him. What, in all their lives by each other’s side, Richie still hasn’t heard, and Carmy likely hasn’t said plainly and out loud, because that’s not the way the Berzatto family seems to say things. Carmy believes in him, he thinks he’s good with people. That’s why he gave Richie this chance to discover his love for service, and therefore for himself. It was never a punishment, but rather a push in the right direction.
The episode closes on Richie looking at the sign hung right under the clock that reads Every second counts. Now, he understands what that means, he understands that as the encouragement it’s meant to be rather than some sort of threat. Every second counts, and it’s never too late to start over. So he does: in the next episode, he’ll walk into The Bear wearing a suit and announce to everyone, “I wear suits now,” and be greeted with admiration and respect. Now that he loves and respects himself, he can more easily love and respect other people, and he receives the same love and respect in return.
Even within the extremely high standard set by The Bear, Forks is an exceptional episode of television. Every detail, from the use of music such as David Byrne’s Glass, Concrete and Stone as we see Richie go through the motions, to the word perseverance being written on the whiteboard in the kitchen right after his phone call with Tiff, then the word progress right at the end, is carefully thought out and executed so as to tell this hopeful, multi-layered love story. And the result might just be one of the greatest love stories ever told.
