Season 3 of the hit Hulu show The Bear gave us plenty of new and exciting celebrity cameos, but it also brought back some favorites from past seasons. One of these was the wonderfully soft-spoken Olivia Colman playing Chef Terry. We originally met her in season 2, episode 7, “Forks,” where she bonds with Cousin Richie, played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach. She comes back to play a prominent role in the third season as the famed restaurant Ever is shutting down. But just who is this character? What is she meant to represent in the show as a whole, and does she have a real-world counterpart?
Is Olivia Colman’s character based on a real chef?
After season 2, The Bear’s creator, Christopher Storer, was interviewed by Time to discuss some of the most important moments from the season. He brought up two names as his inspirations for Chef Terry — Alice Waters and Marcella Hazan. Both are incredibly respected in the culinary world with legacies as highly influential chefs.
Waters opened her first restaurant, Chez Panisse, in 1971, with a love for unprocessed foods. It is considered by many to be the first farm-to-table restaurant. She was one of the first chefs to incorporate local ingredients into her menus, as it wasn’t as popular at this point. Hazan, on the other hand, was much more recipe-centric. As a chef, her focus was on releasing cookbooks and making traditional Italian recipes accessible to the average person. You might recall the red sauce Carmy makes in the finale of the first season. That’s Hazan’s recipe.
How did Olivia Colman create the character of Chef Terry?
Based on the careers of Waters and Hazan, Chef Terry was born. “These amazingly strong women were able to create these food dynasties with a different demeanor, a different sort of elegance [than their male counterparts],” Storer said in the Time interview. Colman, with her established career, had a “…warm, kind, and very normal” presence on set that fit the bill perfectly. The character was meant to be incredibly experienced in the culinary space — professional in a way that rubs off on Richie — while still being humble enough to enjoy the prep work of a kitchen.
She also served as a positive counterpart to many of the male chefs in the show, specifically Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy and his abusive mentor, Joel McHale’s David Fields. The restaurant industry has a checkered history of allowing those who yell the loudest to run their kitchens, stepping on their often underprivileged staff along their way. This is something that Carmy fears he is turning into, and something David Fields has embraced.
In the final episode of season 3, “Forever,” Carmy confronts David at the final meal at Ever before they close their doors. David refuses to accept his behavior as wrong, saying it made Carmy a greater chef. David is also based on a real-world chef, as McHale admitted on Late Night with Seth Meyers. This is a very common line of thinking in the food world, unfortunately.
However, Chef Terry showed us that isn’t the only approach. She not only helped both Carmy and Will Poulter’s Luca at the start of their careers, but her care for Richie is where her kindness truly shines. Chef Terry is an example of not just how women can carve out a space for themselves in the kitchen, but also how any person can make the choice to shine a little bit of light in what is often such a toxic workspace.