The chef and the city: Mobile masculinities in Chef and The Bear

This article examines contemporary chef narratives as sites for negotiating masculinity, mobility and metropolitan space. Focusing on Gordon Ramsay’s documentary television persona, Jon Favreau’s film Chef (2014), and Christopher Storer’s series The Bear (2022–present), it argues that popular food media repeatedly mobilizes what I term the harmful-masculinity redemption arc. Within this narrative trope, male chefs experience crises precipitated by toxic masculine practices – such as emotional repression, aggression and an inability to accept vulnerability – which are subsequently resolved through spatial movement, professional reorientation and affective labour. Drawing on gender studies, food studies and urban cultural theory, the article situates professional kitchens as metropolitan microcosms in which hegemonic, subordinate and alternative masculinities are produced, contested and reconfigured. While earlier formats such as chef autobiographies and documentary television often frame redemption retrospectively and heroically, Chef and The Bear foreground spatial confinement, mobility and relational labour as central to masculine transformation. In particular, The Bear complicates the redemptive logic by embedding masculinity within a multicultural, multi-generational ensemble and by resisting the complete narrative closure characteristic of cinematic redemption arcs. Ultimately, the article argues that contemporary chef narratives both critique and reproduce masculine privilege. While they gesture towards more caring, reflexive and relational masculinities, they frequently recentre male subjectivity and marginalize women’s labour. As such, cooking narratives offer a revealing lens through which to examine the ambivalences of masculinity in neo-liberal, urban culture.