Hands (The Bear)

One year prior, Carmy works at a fine dining restaurant in New York City. While he tries to maintain control in the kitchen, the staff is led by an abusive boss (Joel McHale), who uses every opportunity to insult Carmy and the rest of the staff. One of these includes questioning Carmy's role in the kitchen, claiming he does not belong there.

In present day, Carmy begins to notice the dirty environment of the kitchen and tries to get the staff to clean their areas. That night, Carmy finds that he has been cooking while sleepwalking, causing a small fire in his apartment. The following day, the staff is surprised to meet Nancy, a health inspector who arrives to check the shop. Her brother Ron was the previous health inspector assigned to the shop and he made sure to give them a passing grade, but has since passed away. She quickly finds a lot of safety and sanitation issues, particularly for a pack of cigarettes left in the stove, which Carmy quickly blames Richie. She gives the shop a "C" grade, re-affirming that they cannot get another reevaluation until 30 days later. He gets the staff to fix their problems, including sending Richie to a hardware store to fix a hole in the kitchen.

Family friend Jimmy, referred as "Uncle Cicero", stops by the shop to talk to Carmy. He reveals that Michael asked Cicero for $300,000 that he never paid back, criticizing his brother's actions in giving him the shop. Cicero offers to buy the restaurant back to settle the debt, but Carmy declines, stating that he will pay back the loan. While talking to Sugar on the phone, she suggests attending Al-Anon meetings to help himself. Richie and Sydney get into fights while buying materials to fix the hole, but they bond after Richie makes a phone call to console his daughter. Richie reveals to Sydney that Michael wouldn't allow Carmy to work in the restaurant when he was younger and that he shot himself in the head four months earlier. By the end of the night, Carmy decides to hire Sydney as a proper chef, ending her intern position. While taking a break for a cigarette, Carmy realizes that he was responsible for leaving the pack of cigarettes in the stove.

Sydney thanks Carmy for the past week, and Tina mentions that Sydney arrived "a couple of days ago...all willowy and scribbling."^[1]

Summer's ready
Summer is ready when you are

• Sydney volunteers to strain the fryer oil, but Carmy says he's got it. Straining fryer oil is an important task in an economically managed restaurant but it is a messy and mildly dangerous job (hot oil burns are a risk) that involves waiting for the oil to cool completely, pouring it through a sieve to straining out any food particles to slow oxidation and rancidity, and then funneling it back into its original container for reuse the next day.^[2]
• Carmy falls asleep on his couch while watching Pasta Grannies on YouTube.^[3][4]
• According to the notes on the whiteboard in the office "Fak is bad" [cartoon of man showing butthole] and Fak owes the restaurant $65.
• Richie calls Carmy a "little stunod." Stunod or stunad is Italian-American slang describing someone as a moron or dim-witted.^[5]
• This episode provides additional insight on Carmy's training, when Sydney lectures Richie that Carmy was named Food & Wine's Best New Chef at age 21, she "showcases her reverence for her fellow Chef. As Richie downplays Carmy's accomplishments at Noma, Sydney leaps to his defense and praises the level of detail needed in fine dining."^[6]
• When Carmy says he will "tournant" he is referring to the kitchen brigade position of a tournant chef, who is someone "that can work all stations in the kitchen to replace the chef de partie when absent."^[7]
• While caulking a hole in the wall, Richie spots a sealed envelope that has fallen behind the lockers. It's a message from Mikey to Carmy. Richie puts the note back where he found it, refusing to take responsibility for delivering it to Carmy.
• At the end of the episode, Carmy decides to join Al-Anon. Al-Anon is not Alcoholics Anonymous but a related 12-step program for family members who have been affected by a relative's addiction. As one article about substance abuse and the Berzattos put it, "In Al-Anon, it's usually a parent or child who drove you into the rooms, whose own addiction was severe enough to alter your behavior into something equally unmanageable. Many of the patterns of growing up in an alcoholic, dysfunctional household on constant display in The Bear are pretty typical. In addition to the continuous rage circling Carmy like a red fog any time he puts on a white chef's coat, there are also more subtle showcases of the family disease inside him: Self-sabotage. Insecurity. Hypersensitivity. And then there's the grief...most of the Al-Anon members I interact with have grief in their bones."^[8]

In May 2022, Hulu confirmed that the second episode of the season would be titled "Hands", and was to be written by series creator Christopher Storer.^[9] This marked Storer's second writing and directing credit.^[10]

• Chris Witaske makes his first appearance as Pete in "Hands." Witaske, a native midwesterner, comes from the Second City Chicago improvisational-comedy world and initially auditioned for the role of Richie before trying out for Pete.^[11] In 2025, a BuzzFeed writer thought the introduction of Pete was "perfect," citing the exchange of dialogue between Sugar (Abby Elliott), on the phone with Carmy, and Pete in the background.^[12]

Nat: Shut the fuck up.
Pete: You want me to shut the fuck up?
Nat: Not you, sweetie, you didn't say anything.
Pete: Oh! Copy that!^[12]

• Joel McHale makes his first appearance as an asshole chef who tormented Carmy when he worked in New York. McHale and Chris Storer's long-time partner Gillian Jacobs costarred on the NBC comedy Community from 2009 to 2015.^[13] In 2024, GQ described McHale's character as "not just the ghost of a bully chef, [but] the representative spirit of abuse, power imbalances, and the white-male dominated French brigade system that has been terrorizing the restaurant industry for centuries, a toxicity passed down from one generation to the next."^[14]

Courtney Wheeler did the costume design for episodes two through eight of season one, taking over from Cristina Spiridakis, who costumed the pilot episode.^[15] Sydney wears a smiley-face-and-Mount-Fuji bandana made by the Japanese clothing brand Kapital.^[16] She also wears a silk V141 Color Block "design in green, red, black, and white" from Italian brand Viso.^[17][18]

The title of the episode, "Hands," which is used in restaurants to mean "they need someone there to hold or carry something immediately. Usually it means that they need a server or food runner to come and take a hot order out to a table."^[19]

The scenes with White's Carmy and McHale's Fields were shot over "a single morning."^[14] Chicago's three-Michelin-star Grace restaurant played the role of Fields' restaurant in New York, which was initially implied to perhaps be Eleven Madison Park (EMP), and in season three is retconned into a wholly fictional (but similar) restaurant called Empire.^[20][14][21]

The show is tightly scripted although naturalistically filmed, but Liza Colón-Zayas was encouraged to freestyle a little with Tina's "all willowy and scribbling" rant about Sydney. According to editor Joanna Naugle, "There was a bit of improv coming from the character of Tina when she's talking about not trusting Sydney. Sort of, 'Okay, we want you to talk about this for three minutes and you know the character well.'"^[22]

Cinematographer Andrew Wehde began shooting the show with "Hands," taking over from pilot cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra.^[23] He told Panavision.com in 2022 about the set constructed for filming episodes two through eight of season one:^[24]

We did an entire interactive lighting setup on the stage so that every single light in the restaurant—whether it was back of the kitchen, front of the kitchen, or the dining room—was a full RGB LED, controlled by our dimmer-board operator. We never brought any lights onto the set, so we never had to wait for things, and there were no C-stands or movie lights in the way. It was all practical-based lighting. And outside of the stage, we had about 10 old-school 18K tungsten lights to give us the rich, warm light coming into the restaurant. We also built the entire stage so the dolly could run without track or dance floor...Every stove, every oven, every refrigerator—they call them low boys, which are the fridges underneath the counters—the bakery, even the soda machines worked. Chris designed it in that way so that he could always lean on reality versus what a lot of us have done in the food-commercial world, which is bring in the precooked food and make it look good on camera. Our approach on The Bear was that everything was made fresh on set and done by the actors, even down to the point that Jeremy Allen White, who's our lead, would cut celery and carrots and onions, and prep the bins for the scene, while we spent 10 or 15 minutes setting up a scene. If he needed to cook something in the scene, he would start precooking. He was in that character, cooking, while we would set the shots.^[24]

The soundtrack for the episode included "Rocco and His Brothers" by Mi Loco Tango, "Ajai Finale" by Kenny Segal and Serengeti, "Have You Seen Me Lately?" by Counting Crows, "Saints" by the Breeders, and "Saint Dominic's Preview" by Van Morrison.^[25] Executive producer Josh Senior said that this was to show Richie and Carmy's contrasting personalities, "It felt like an opportunity to show Richie being vulnerable, and at the same time have the same song mean something totally different for Carmy."^[26] The episode uses two different versions of the Counting Crows song, the version on the Recovering the Satellites studio album and a live version released on Across a Wire: Live in New York City.^[26]

What does chef feed himself, alone at night in his thrift-store-furnished apartment? A peanut butter and jelly sandwich, washed down with the contents of an aluminum can of Coke, both served couch-side with a view of YouTube.^[27][28]

"Hands" received mostly positive reviews from critics. Marah Eakin of Vulture gave the episode a 4 star out of 5 rating and wrote, "“Hands” isn't as frenetic and electric as the show's pilot, but in a way that's good. It would be hard to keep up that energy for the whole series, especially as the restaurant does seem to at least be on some long and winding path toward maybe, maybe, maybe getting its shit back together."^[29]

Mia Sidoti of MovieWeb named the episode as the seventh best of the season, writing ""Hands", episode two, gives us a much-needed backstory for Carmy when he was in New York City as a fine dining chef and saw how his relationship was with the head chef at the restaurant. He was verbally abused and treated terribly, so the contrast to the way he treats his crew with respect and appreciation is stunning and makes you feel for Carmy even more. We also learn that he sleepwalks and cooks things in his sleep, leading him to almost burn down his apartment, which is shocking and stressful for the audience."^[30]

In 2024, Josh Wigler of The Hollywood Reporter named the episode as the 23rd best (of 28), writing "Joel McHale debuts as an at-the-time unnamed fine-dining chef who serves as Carmy's boogeyman. While it takes almost two full seasons for the character to return, McHale's performance is haunting enough that when he does return in the future, the significance of his presence is immediately felt."^[31] Screen Rant ranked "Hands" 25th out of the 28 episodes produced through the end of season three, in part because it's an exposition-heavy installment after the pilot and "doesn't quite hold up as well to scrutiny."^[32]

In 2025, Vulture ranked "Hands" as 26th-best out of 38 episodes of The Bear, describing it as "good not great," but "an essential episode in setting up the lore of The Bear."^[33]

"You're gonna get some caulk, and you're gonna caulk that shit." "FYI, I'm not your fucking gopher." "FYI, you caulked it up; you're gonna caulk it out!"

Screen Rant listed Carmy and Richie yelling at each other about cocks caulks as the 8th-funniest scene of the series up to 2024: "In a scene filled with innuendo, Carmy and Richie argue over an issue at the restaurant that leads to a poor health inspection [grade]...The overplayed innuendo adds to the humor, comedically demonstrating how the restaurant staff communicates."^[34]