Brigade (The Bear)

Carmy attends an Al-Anon meeting in an attempt to better understand his brother's struggles with addiction. At the restaurant, he introduces a brigade de cuisine-style kitchen and relies on the ill-prepared and increasingly frustrated Sydney to manage it. After initial failures, the staff begins to connect to their new roles—particularly Marcus, the passionate baker. Sydney confronts Carmy about being missing most of the day after not listening to her reservations about the new hierarchy. Carmy agrees that they need to collaborate and listen to each other if the business is going to succeed.

"We can do it differently, okay? I cannot keep yelling at them every day. We have to cut it out. We have to change the chemistry, right?" "Yeah, but…" "We wanna change this restaurant, right?" "Right." "I will dial business, you are everything else."

"Brigade" takes place around November 15, 2022, because Sugar leaves Carmy a voicemail reminding him that it's Mikey's birthday.^[1]

• When Richie is nicknaming customers by their hats, one guy is "Sysco" which is a major retail supply company and another lady is "Blossom" because she has midlength blonde hair and a porkpie hat like the main character on the TV show Blossom.
• Sydney is touching her cheek like she has tooth pain when she walks past Carmy telling Marcus about the plum dish.^[a]
• When Sydney is yelling at Richie about "the chits," she is talking about the order tickets.^[2]
• Sydney tells Sweeps and other staffers clean out the "lowboys," which is what restaurant workers call low refrigerators that fit underneath countertops.^[3]
• The title of the episode refers to the kitchen brigade system, developed by the 19th-century Frenchman Auguste Escoffier, who documented and codified many traditional kitchen practices, including what are now called the French mother sauces, and applied the "structure and duties of a military brigade into the kitchen, assigning over 20 specific cook positions throughout the kitchen."^[4] War vet Ebra connected the dots between a military brigade and the restaurant form when he commented, "I was in a brigade once. Many people died."^[5] According to one examination of the show in the journal Organization Studies, Carmy and Syd are working through an organizational process called recategorization, of which the brigade system is a crucial preliminary step: "Originating in 19th-century France to organize work in upscale kitchens, this concept, akin to Taylorism, aims to optimize task efficiency and productivity. Previously operating with a flat structure and unclear assignments, The Beef's team now sees the new sous-chef assigning specific roles...This intervention creates a hierarchical structure, with each chef adhering to a strict chain of command. The sous-chef also introduces daily routines like a 'pre-shift meeting', 'front-of-the-house walkthrough', and 'end-of-the-day review', fostering internal work coordination. Initially, the new work systems faced pushback, with one chef even responding, 'No hablo inglés.' However, over time, the implementation of the kitchen brigade and clear role distribution improved operations and enhanced team culture."^[6]
  • Carmy - chef de cuisine
  • Sydney - sous chef, saucier
  • Tina - chef garde manger
  • Ebra - chef de partie
  • Marcus - pâtissier

"Brigade" was written by Christopher Storer.^[7]

Molly Ringwald was cast as a speaker in Carmy's Al-Anon group who reflected on addict-adjacent toxic relationships.^[8]

The aprons that Carmy hands out to the staff to visually unify the crew are the Travail style of bib apron from a French brand called Bragard.^[9] The season one aprons were surplus purchased from the French Laundry restaurant in Napa after they were rejected for being the incorrect shade of blue.^[10]

Syd wears a trout-themed headscarf made by Mountain Trail Outfitters.^[11]

• In 2024 the New York Times surmised that the spoon Carmy brandished while meeting with the staff in "Brigade" is a Gary Kunz sauce spoon, which is "a workhorse of restaurant kitchens" and "beloved by professional chefs".^[12]
• Sydney preps carrots and chops onions using a Kuhn Rikon peeler and a Mac Mighty MTH-80 chef's knife.^[12]

• The scene where Carmy looks out on Lake Michigan was shot near the Drake Hotel on Michigan Avenue.^[13]
• Carmy's Al-Anon group meets at Quinn Chapel AME Church, a historic Romanesque Revival building in Bronzeville that is home to Chicago's oldest Black congregation.^[14][15]

The songs featured in the episode include "The Dream Is Always the Same" by Tangerine Dream, "Dennehy" by Serengeti, "In Too Deep" by Genesis, and "Oh My Heart" by R.E.M.^[16] "Oh My Heart" is the first, but not the last, R.E.M. song played on the show: "'I came home to a city half erased / I came home to face what we faced,' sings Stipe. The plaintive quality of his voice way to the fore, so unlike their earliest releases. On screen, Jeremy Allen White as Carmen 'Carmy' Berzatto is shown in close-up, his face etched with sorrow. It's all there. His brother Mikey’s death, new beginnings for himself—and maybe the city of Chicago and the country too. The song takes us deeper inside the emotions. The emotions take us deeper inside the song. It is TV magic."^[17]

• Carmy describes an involved dessert that required "plum syrup, consommé, compressed fresh plums, and a plum gelée" prepared to match the consistency of Haribo gummy bears.^[18]
• Family meal is Ebra's chicken suqaar  [so] (Arabic: صغار), a seasoned meat and vegetable dish popular in Somalia and Somalian-American communities.^[19][20][21] One food writer commented that "it makes perfect sense why this would be the dish Ebrahim throws together given what he has access to in the Beef's kitchen...[suqaar] basically requires chopping everything into small pieces and cooking it together" like a Somali stir-fry.^[18] According to chef Ifrah F. Ahmed, the core ingredients in hilib suqaar are finely chopped meat, xawaash seasoning, and peppers.^[22] The meat can be camel, chicken, lamb, beef, etc., and it pairs well with a flatbread (for instance, muufo) or rice.^[22] Basbaas cagaar, a green hot sauce, is another common accompaniment.^[22]

BuzzFeed recognized Ringwald's brief appearance as "too good to overlook."^[23]

Carmy's dictate to Sydney sets the pair further apart from the rest of the crew and contributes to building anxiety that underlies season one: "When Carmy appoints Sydney as sous-chef and instructs her to implement a French-brigade hierarchy they’re both familiar with, the existing squad of employees struggle to adjust to the new environment. Tensions run high as the original staff must start taking orders from a young girl they've known for a week."^[24] Another BuzzFeed writer named Sydney and Carmy's conversation behind the restaurant as one of the key moments in the development of Syd and Carmy's relationship over the first three seasons of the show.^[25]

In 2024, The Hollywood Reporter placed "Brigade" at 22 on a ranked list of 28 episodes produced to that point, highlighting the changes to the restaurant that lead to "Carm and Syd's first major fight, swiftly followed by their first makeup, followed just as swiftly by the memorable (and accurate) line: 'Fuck brunch'."^[26] Screen Rant ranked "Brigade" 27th out of the 28 episodes produced through the end of season three, in part because Syd's solitary battles with the crew make it "a draining watch...The episode goes a long way in showing how chaotic things get in the restaurant...but it struggles to match up with the rest of the series."^[27]

In 2025, Vulture ranked "Brigade" as 16th-best out of 38 episodes of The Bear, describing it as a "formative" piece of season one.^[28]

• List of The Bear episodes
• The Bear season one
• Previous episode: "Hands"
• Next episode: "Dogs"