Her restaurant life? It’s “crazy and wonderful”

If you watch any restaurant show – especially “The Bear,” the acclaimed drama-comedy that returns to Hulu on June 22 – there are two logical reactions:
1) I would never want to work in a restaurant. People fret, fail, shout, rage, agonize; they also have bad hours and are prone to addiction and alcoholism.
2) I’d really like to work in a restaurant. It looks like fun.
Courtney “Coco” Storer (shown here), the inspiration and “culinary producer” for “The Bear,” occasionally leans toward the first one. “I always ask myself, ‘Why am I doing this? Are you insane?’” she said.
But mostly, she’s with the second. “I love it,” she told the Television Critics Association. “I don’t think I’ll ever leave the hospitality world. As crazy as it is, I think it’s equal parts crazy as it is wonderful.”
In its early episodes, “The Bear” was more crazy than wonderful. Michael Berzatto had run a struggling Chicago restaurant. Addicted to drugs, he shut others out of his life. Then he killed himself; the restaurant was inherited by his brother Carmen (“Carmy” Bear for short), who had been learning from master chefs, and his sister Natalie.
People struggled, shouted, made do. And then, as the season ended, Carmen discovered a fortune his brother had hidden in tomato cans. He planned to use the money to switch to a fine-dining approach.
All of that – eight episodes, released in one plunk last June – was like a prologue, said Christopher Storer, who is the show’s creator and Courtney’s brother. “Season Two is sort of like where the show properly begins, once we have met everyone and seen the backstory totally.”
He’s spent his career producing and directing (but not writing) award-winning shows — comedy specials for Bo Burnham, Hasan Minhaj, Chris Rock and Jerrod Carmichael, plus a series for Ramy Youssef. Gradually, his interest in a restaurant setting grew.
“The only time I would see my sister, forever, was if I came to the restaurant,” he said. “It’s a job where the hours are very, very strange, … starting early in the morning and going very, very late.”
Still, it’s been her passion since she first lied about her age to get a job. There’s a sense of family and fun, she said. Things never get stagnant. “There’s knowledge everywhere. Whatever job you’re doing, you’re learning …. That’s been true for me since I’ve been 15. I’ve grown up in restaurants.”
She did try normalcy after college, with a corporate human-resources job, but she was soon going to culinary school at night. Then she worked at top restaurants in Paris and Los Angeles.
That sort of led to her brother’s show. “It’s based on a lot of Coco,” he said, “but it’s also based on a lot of our friends in Chicago who have restaurants and are small business owners.”
He wrote the opening episode and then linked with Joanna Calo (“Beef,” “BoJack Horseman”),to be co-showrunners. Jeremy Allen White (who was Lip in “Shameless”) was cast as Carmen and threw himself into it. “I wanted to become a really great chef,” he said.
At least, he could look like one. With Courtney Storer as “culinary producer,” there’s an emphasis on realism. The show is produced by FX (for Hulu), which supported “making this, iike, indie in the winter of Chicago,” Christopher Storer said.
That independent-movie approach drew strong reviews and more. The American Film Institute gave “The Bear” one of its 10 show-of-the-year awards; the Golden Globes nominated it for best comedy. White won best-actor awards from the Globes, Screen Actors Guild and Critics Choice.
John Landgraf, the FX CEO, even went against his usual style by releasing all eight episodes at once.
The result? “There were already something like 140,000 concurrent streams of the eighth episode by the next morning,” he said. People were binging; on Thursday, they can do it with 10 new episodes.