When dress-up is Bear-able

It was an intriguing invitation, even though I am no fan of themed dressing up. Probably because the last time I took it seriously was about 50 years ago and it was stressful for this farm boy, then about 12 years old.

I was obsessed with glam-rock, described by the digital encyclopaedia Encarta as “a style of pop music in the UK in the 1970s performed by singers and musicians wearing outrageous clothes, make-up, hairstyles and platform-soled boots”. 

It must have been around 1973, which is when David Bowie released his hit single Sorrow, off his covers album Pin Ups. I played Sorrow to death. I was fixated by Bowie’s very glam look — extravagant and androgynous. 

When you click on the album’s cover picture on Wikipedia it tells you it is “a red-haired man with heavy makeup sitting with a female model”. The red-haired man was Bowie, and the female model Twiggy. 

One afternoon my parents went off to town in my dad’s bakkie for business. There was no time for dilly-dallying for my Bowie dressing-up because they never took long: bank, post office, farmer’s co-op, greengrocer and back. 

I liberally applied my mom’s make-up. My blond, curly hair refused Bowie’s spiky hairdo.

Ready, I put on my mom’s velvet mantle  and lowered the needle on Sorrow to mime along. 

Two minutes, 12 seconds later I was scrubbing the make-up off my face — my parents were tolerant people but a farm-boy Bowie in 1970s South African platteland would have been a bridge too far. 

I somehow managed to clean up all traces of my “show” — didn’t damage my mom’s lipstick, spill her mascara or leave rouge in the basin. But the stress of being caught cured me of dressing up, although I remained an enthusiastic Bowie fan through his subsequent phases.

A fortnight ago, I got an invitation from Disney+’s PR people to “The Bear Joburg Experience”. I was immediately more than keen, because for me The Bear is up there with Breaking Bad and Fargo as contemporary television’s finest series. 

We have just started watching season three of this gripping story, described by National Public Radio as “a show about scars and ghosts, because it is in so many ways a show about consequences and grief. Not all the scars are visible, of course, and not all the ghosts are dead.”

The BBC Culture website says, with this third season, “The Bear has given television its next great sympathetic anti-hero. Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) — the scrappy, soul-tortured chef struggling to save a sandwich joint and then start a new upscale restaurant in previous seasons — now behaves like a monstrous egomaniac.”

It was an immediate, “Yes please!” from me to the invitation that said: “Critics are calling FX’s The Bear the best thing on TV, but what good is all that drama if you can’t taste it for yourself? Come experience the intensity of a real Michelin star-trained chef, Gregory Czarnecki, for an immersive night of haute cuisine and a peek behind the curtain at what restaurant life is really like.”

I sent the PR person an email: “BTW, what is ‘Chicago Chic’? Is it like the guys in The Bear?”

She replied: “Yep! Some snazzy denim, a clean-cut T-shirt. You can have as much fun as you like with it.”

Next it was onto Google. First to check out the chef. The first return for my “chef Czarnecki” search had an opening line worthy of an entry in British satirical magazine Private Eye’s column Pseuds Corner, which lists pretentious quotations from the media: “Cape Town hotels are on a trajectory to aggrandise their epicurean offerings with the appointment of some of the country’s top award-winning chefs to their kitchens.”

The 43-year-old Czarnecki, is of course, not to blame for that article, and with his stellar CV, the French-born chef doesn’t need purple prose like that.

There are the Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris he has worked in. Last year, he took charge at the Cape Grace hotel’s kitchen. He was previously head chef at The Restaurant at Waterkloof, where he won the Chef of the Year award from Eat Out in 2016, and the establishment itself was named best overall by the food guide in 2018.

He was also a judge on the fourth season of MasterChef South Africa in 2022, showing his popular touch.

Clothes and The Bear go hand in hand. In the first episode, the lead character Carmy must save the bankrupt Chicago restaurant he inherited from his brother, who committed suicide. 

As described by Esquire: “So, Carmy does what anyone in his situation would do — he goes home, opens his oven, and retrieves a few pairs of the extremely rare, vintage pieces of denim he’s storing there. (There are even more in his closet — the oven is just where the overflow stock goes.) Then, he sets up a shady parking-lot meeting and sells them.”

The quirky Mr Porter wrote that “perhaps most unexpectedly — at least for a show set in the behind-the-scenes of a gritty sandwich shop — it was the wardrobe that became the breakout star”.

So, it is not surprising that my search for “The Bear clothes” resulted in superb articles in style bibles such as Esquire, GQ, Mr Porter’s The Journal and numerous nerdy clothes blogs.

The brands in the show are not exotic: Dickies, Birkenstocks, Carhartt beanies, Jordan, Levi’s, J.Crew and Boss.

“The outfits on The Bear might not look overtly ostentatious — but for the niche menswear fanatics, isn’t that the best way to go?” asks Esquire. “It’s about everyday, real-world fashion; a streetwear brand here, an impulsively bought designer purchase there.”

The show’s costume designer Courtney Wheeler said in an interview: “Chefs have a particular eye for detail and what looks good —quality, cut, colour …”

All of that convinced me that I was ready to dress up again because it would involve clothes I could live with and in. And no lipstick or mascara would be harmed.

With Mr Porter’s line that the clothes in The Bear manage “to appear both effortless and carefully considered” in mind, I needed only to fill two dress-up gaps for the “The Bear Joburg Experience”. I already had Birkenstocks, a well-worn pair of Japanese selvedge jeans and so a purple Carhartt beanie from the hipster store Shelflife in Joburg’s Rosebank, plus a quality white cotton T from Woolies, were all I needed. 

A quick aside on Carmy’s white T-shirts — in the series he only wears Merz b. Schwanen loopwheeled, literally seamless, ones (not available here in South Africa and will set you back a healthy $75 each for international shipping).

They are made in Germany on old-school tubular machines that knit in a circular motion.

“Loopwheel machines are very inefficient by modern standards, producing fabric some 10 times more slowly than modern machinery — and you need an entire new loopwheel machine for each size of T-shirt you make,” says the Stridewise website, explaining why they are so costly.

Last Wednesday night, kitted out to the T, I’m the first to arrive at my table for The Bear Joburg Experience pop-up. 

The restaurant starts filling up — a few of us media hacks but mostly celebrities and influencers. 

I realise I am the only guest who has bothered to come dressed in “Chicago Chic”. The rest of the pack are clearly more used to, and blasé about, these kinds of events.

I can see into the kitchen but it seems calm in there — certainly no wild The Bear vibes.

A laid-back Chef Czarnecki walks in, and the noise in the restaurant subsides as he introduces each dish. 

From his black Birkenstock Tokio Super Grip Leather sandals to the sculpted beard, he looks the part. We will soon find out that he — as behooves a Michelin-trained chef — will also magnificently cook the part: bread and butter (three ways); hake quenelle, champagne velouté sauce and caviar; poached chicken, morel and port jus and crispy skin; and rum baba, vanille bleu de la Réunion and passion fruit, all perfectly paired with delicious wine.

Czarnecki watched The Bear’s season three in one evening, he tells us with a smile. 

“Why did I take this event? There have always been a lot of TV shows with chefs included but, for me, they never really portray the reality of what chefs go through.

“This one … it’s a good representation, all chefs have a bit of PTSD: the chaos, the burn, the sleepless nights — it is very extreme what we go through.”

Before we leave, one of the assistant chefs gives us an envelope. Inside are the recipes for tonight’s meal. 

This weekend I’m aiming to do that rum baba dessert. I will do it alone because my family would burst out laughing if I were to insist that they shout back, “Yes, chef!”