Until Season 3 of “The Bear,” only viewers who knew about restaurant hospitality could recognize the Will Guidara Effect.
Mr. Guidara was the Paul McCartney to chef Daniel Humm’s John Lennon at Eleven Madison Park, the acclaimed New York City restaurant they once owned together. During their 13 years together, the staff’s trademark was to provide guests with small treats and outrageous surprises based on guest research and snippets of overheard conversation. He once stopped by to buy a dirty-water hot dog that Mr. Humm had prepared with quenelles of sauerkraut and relish and delivered to a table full of food-minded tourists who said they were leaving town without tasting a New York City hot dog.
Mr. Guidara’s book “Unreasonable hospitality” first made a cameo in the show’s second season. The episode, called “Forks,” follows the evolution of the lovable but troubled Richie Jerimovich (played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who ran the failing Chicago sandwich shop at the center of the show. When it transforms into a fancy restaurant called the Bear, Richie finds his calling as a hospitality professional after donning a suit and spending a week learning how to wait tables at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
While training, a waiter overhears a family saying they’d be sad to leave Chicago without trying deep-dish pizza. Richie runs to Pequod’s Pizza Shop, grabs a pie, and the chef, with a cookie cutter and some micro basil, transforms it into a modernist dish that Richie serves to the astonished diners. It’s pure Guidara.
This season, Mr. Guidara was listed as a co-producer and received a story credit in an episode titled “Doors.” Attentive viewers noticed his “WG” initials when Richie texted someone about a restaurant that was closing, and he has a major cameo in the season finale, in which he delivers an impassioned speech about hospitality that begins, “There’s a nobility in this.”
In his first interview since season three debuted on June 26, Mr. Guidara talks about the show, the service and celebrity. (The interview has been condensed and edited.)
A lot of people were surprised to see not only your cameo, but also your name as a co-producer. You even have a story credit on the episode “Doors” in the new season. How did you essentially become the muse of the show?
I met Chris (series creator and writer Christopher Storer) years ago, actually, before season 1. Someone introduced us to talk about restaurants in general while he was doing his research. We stayed in touch and became closer. They used the book for “Forks” in season 2 and that led to more and more conversations as the show went into season 3, and the restaurant became a real restaurant. He said, “Hey, would you ever consider this?” Working on something that I already love with people that I love and can learn from? It’s just impossible to say no to, right?
One of your ideas that first came up in that episode of “Forks” and that was carried through in a larger way in Season 3 is the idea of a dreamweaver, a position you created while you were at Eleven Madison Park and that you wrote about extensively in your book. You describe it as the position that embodies the philosophy of unreasonable hospitality.
I get messages from people in almost every industry these days telling me that they have dreamweavers working in their company, which is really cool. The idea is that any successful person who is even remotely talented in whatever field they choose to be is pretty unreasonable, pretty creative, and pretty single-minded in their pursuit of whatever product they put out there. It’s about taking that same almost maniacal focus and using it to make people feel seen and to make them feel connected.
I understand there were even dream weavers on the set of “The Bear.”
Yeah, especially for the episode “Seven Fishes” with all the guest stars (in season 2). They wanted to make sure that all the guest stars felt like they were welcome in their home and felt hospitality. Chris was like, “Listen, if people feel welcome, if they feel at home, then we’re going to get their best work out of them, right?” They embodied unreasonable hospitality on set.
Can you give me an example of dreamweaving on set?
Absolutely. They knew what everyone’s coffee order was. So when Jamie Lee Curtis is there, they can say, “Hey, this is the coffee you like. We’ve got it here for you.” Obviously, I’m not a seasoned professional in the world of television, but I think you’re used to not-so-great drip coffee from the break room.
You often say that everyone has hospitality within them, but that they need to be encouraged to do so.
Sometimes the best way to make that happen is to just feel — just once — how good it feels to treat someone kindly and how that can be instantly contagious and addictive. I try to convey that in the book, but I don’t think you can ever express it in writing as beautifully as they did when they gobbled down that pizza crust and Richie witnessed their reaction and then raced home, listened to Taylor Swift and then walked around the bar reading the book. You can tell he’s hooked and he’s found his purpose now.
Is there a place where producing a television program and organizing a restaurant dinner are the same thing?
When you’re in the kitchen in the back and on set, it feels the same. And everyone eats together in both environments. In the restaurant, you have the sommeliers, the bartenders, the waiters, the chefs. On set, you have the camera, the crew, the props, and then the actors, the writers, and the producers. In a restaurant, you want everyone to care so much about their particular piece of the puzzle that they’re willing to push to make sure that their particular piece of it doesn’t get watered down. But they do it with a deep respect for everyone else around them. That culture was merged into “The Bear.”
To say that you care a lot about details might be an understatement. Tell me some details you really appreciated that they got it right with “The Bear”.
When I walked on that set, I felt like a fish out of water, and I had things that I wanted to say because I noticed little things. And Chris would always say, dude, just yell it. If you see something, just yell it, whether it’s like, you know, telling Jeremy, “Hey, that’s not how I would pick up napkins if I had a tray, or that’s not how we would do this.” Everyone would always say, “Oh man, thank you so much.”
If you pause in that episode where Matty Matheson (the Canadian chef who plays the character Neil Fak) is showing Jeremy (Allen White, who plays the chef Carmy) pictures of the critics whose faces are plastered on the wall, and you just zoom in on your iPad and read everything that they wrote for each of those critics. They just took the opportunity to be creative. I told the props people if I ever open a restaurant again, you guys should come help me open it, because they really made opening a restaurant fun.
The season opens with a scene that looks like it’s set in Eleven Madison Park. Sydney (played by Ayo Edebiri) is dining alone and tries a blood orange hamachi dish that Carmy made. She would later become his chef partner at the Bear. Was it weird seeing your old haunt recreated on TV? Were you really involved in making it look like the old Eleven Madison Park?
No, I wasn’t a part of it, and it’s not explicitly Eleven Madison. In a weird way, it’s kind of a TV-Land amalgamation of what that restaurant represented.
So Carmy’s tormentor is a chef played by Joel McHale. At some point in the pilot we find out that Carmy worked at Eleven Madison. So the tormentor is not modeled after Daniel Humm?
No. It was like [the restaurant] Daniel was Daniel, right? And Noma was Noma, and French Laundry was French Laundry, right? And even Ever was Ever. This restaurant would have been Eleven Madison if it had to be Eleven Madison.
The season finale featured some big names: Grant Achatz, Wylie Dufresne, Malcolm Livingston II, and your wife, Christina Tosi. They’re gathered at the funeral dinner for Ever, a real restaurant that plays the role of the three-star restaurant where Richie trained. How much of your speech and other speeches in the final scene were scripted, and how much came straight from your heart?
There was nothing scripted in that last scene. I’m not going to pretend that everything I say is the first time it came out, but the way that scene happened was crazy. We all sat down and Chris said, “Hey guys, talk about this for a minute.” And then we just talked, almost forgetting the cameras were there.
Is there a big picture to be drawn about the state of the hospitality industry in America and the responses to it as depicted in “The Bear”?
A lot of my friends in the industry say that this is the first show that really focuses on the perspective of the people who work in those restaurants and does it accurately. One of my favorite definitions of hospitality is that it’s about giving people a sense of belonging. This show is a beautiful celebration of the fact that this industry does that for so many people who work in it, and gives people who may be rudderless some direction and purpose, and gives the people who already have that direction something to be more passionate about. I’ve read a few pieces from restaurateurs who felt like Season 3 focused too much on the negative and dramatic side of restaurants. I think if that’s what you walked away with, I don’t think you looked at it closely enough.
