Mary McNamara: 'The Bear' isn't about the pressures of fine dining. It's about the damage alcoholism inflicts

The doors to the Bear may be open, but the elephant is still in the kitchen.

"The Bear," FX's Emmy sweeping, meme-generating, kitchen-whites selling, deeply immersive experience of a series dropped on Hulu on Wednesday, and viewers are scrambling to see what kind of sweat-of-their-brow delicacies it serves up next. By exposing the world to the wonder of the Chicago beef sandwich, the regimented patois of the kitchen and a cast that appears to have been assembled in heaven, "The Bear" has taken restaurant culture to a whole new "Yes, chef!" level.

For an adult child of an alcoholic, however, "The Bear" isn't about restaurants. Not the wonder of bringing order to the unholy mess of a kitchen that produced Chicagoland's best beef sandwiches, as happened in the first season, or the NASA-like precision required to conjure a high-end fine dining establishment, as happened in the second.

It certainly isn't about the intricate "corner," "hands," "Yes, chef!" ballet or the meticulous genius required to create a masterpiece out of a scallop, a sprig of fennel and a blood-orange reduction. It's not even how the most disparate and seemingly ill-fitting assortment of characters since "Hogan's Heroes" somehow comes together as a team that lifts each member to better things.

Nope, for an adult child of an alcoholic, or at least this one, "The Bear" is 100% about the anxiety. Feeling the anxiety. Recognizing the anxiety.

I want to do it but I can't. OK, I can but what if it's not any good? It's good but what if people don't like it? People like it but what if they don't like it enough? What is enough? Certainly not "good." No, it needs to be great. Stop telling me it's great, you don't understand greatness, it needs to be better. I'm so tired but put that down because you won't do it right and it needs to be beyond great. It needs to be perfect. So perfect that time stops and it's only me up here on top of this verifiably perfect thing and maybe then the voices in my head will finally run out of terrible things to say.

Raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about.

Carmen "Carmy" Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White) knows what I'm talking about. Moments after opening the doors to the Bear at the end of Season 2, Carmy found himself locked in the freezer; in the weeks leading up to the soft open, he had been so busy micromanaging and eschewing help, even from his brilliant sous-chef Sydney (Ayo Edebiri) and his manager-sister Sugar (Abby Elliott), that he never got around to fixing the broken freezer door handle.

As his crew stepped up to make the evening a success, Carmy spent his time cursing his fate, unwittingly telling the girl that he loved why he couldn't have a relationship and a restaurant, then lashing out at Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who actually saved the day, because Richie had the temerity to suggest that Carmy was behaving just like his mother.

Which he most certainly was. Because Carmy's mother, Donna Berzatto (Jamie Lee Curtis), is an alcoholic, and children of alcoholics, whether they drink or not, tend to behave like alcoholics.

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