Here's how that Chicago restaurant makes those dishes on 'The Bear'

Chef Curtis Duffy keeps his kitchen at Fulton Market restaurant Ever immaculate. Dry storage is hidden. Red wine is in a cellar. The spice rack is organized. Nothing should be above eye level, and no chaos should lurk.

“I like to hide everything,” he said, standing next to the silverware drawer. “I feel like some of the best service is service that is unseen.”

Season 2 of Hulu series “The Bear” put the kitchen at the Michelin-starred restaurant on full display. The forks hidden in those drawers? Richie polished them in Episode 7.

On Wednesday night, Hulu dropped Season 3 of The Bear, which follows a renowned chef who comes back to Chicago and attempts to transform his family’s Italian beef stand into a fine-dining establishment. Ever is once again a backdrop in the show.

Duffy’s staff prepared several dishes during filming. They recently gave Crain’s a tutorial on what goes into cooking those pristine dishes. Chef de Cuisine Lucas Trahan walked through the creation of a carrot terrine, a wagyu beef dish, and a rice pudding dessert. Duffy said at least two of the dishes — the carrot and the rice — might appear in Season 3.

FIRST DISH: CARROT TERRINE

The dish is inspired by a classic French terrine, but is made with vegetables instead of meat. Trahan used carrots when he demonstrated the preparation in mid-May, but now it uses asparagus.

Ever’s tasting menu, which typically runs through eight to 12 courses, is heavily influenced by the seasons. Duffy will develop a technique for a dish, but swap out ingredients as the season progresses. The carrot terrine is an example of this practice.

Trahan started with a terrine mold lined with plastic wrap and a tray of orange and yellow carrots that had been salted and steamed, so they cooked in their own juice. Tricolor carrots tend to be the softer and sweeter option, but he left out the purple ones because they bleed and throw off the presentation. He sorted the carrots by size and color, and assembled them inside the mold. When set and sliced, the terrine looks like a cobblestone path.

“You’re composing this almost little art piece,” he said, as he arranged the carrots in the mold.

Trahan then poured in a liquid made from gelatin and carrots that had been juiced and blended. Gelatin takes hours to fully set. For each bite to properly melt on the palate, the dish sets in the fridge overnight. At Ever, the preparation for tomorrow begins today. But building the dish — “the fun part,” as Trahan called it — happens as a customer sits down at their table.

“There’s an ephemeral nature to the food,” Trahan said, as he pulled out a set terrine from the fridge and sliced it. “It dies really quickly, so it’s best fresh.”

To build the dish, Trahan starts with a slice of the terrine. He uses a hallow pastry tip to add a crater of green paste made from Sicilian pistachios, and fills the crater with a yellow yuzu vinaigrette. He adds an oblong scoop of mascarpone cheese and dots the plate with drops of green. Those green dots are a blend of blanched parsley, spinach and modified tapioca starch. Tweezers help him delicately place purple carrot slices, fried pistachios and olives throughout the dish.

He adds a dark grey powder — a salty concoction of black olive oil blended with black olives and turned to powder using maltodextrin — and tops the dish with some meticulously placed carrot tops. It is ready for the table.

The terrine is the third course on Ever’s tasting menu. The white plate that arrives at the table pops with color. The carrot slices in the terrine look like the bubbles in a lava lamp. It’s a choose-your-own adventure dish, and each bite is a different pairing of flavors and textures. The yuzu sauce delivers a burst of flavor, cutting through the creamy mascarpone. The black olive bits are crispy and salty, and the pistachios bring in crunch.

SECOND DISH: WAGYU BEEF

Trahan doesn’t typically like Wagyu beef. He thinks the meat, which comes from a Japanese breed of cattle and is famous for its buttery marbling, can be too rich. But he sees the Wagyu beef dish on Ever’s current tasting menu as an exception.

The portion of A5 Wagyu — the highest grade available — that the restaurant uses is barely two ounces. The other flavors and preparation techniques used in the dish offset the fattiness, as well, so as not to oversaturate. The trick with a tasting menu is to leave the diner wanting more.

Composing the dish means deploying a few other tricks of the tasting-menu trade. Trahan started by making what’s called a veil out of stout from Marz Brewing. A veil can be made from any liquid, and it results in a thin sheet that can be draped over other elements of the dish — in this case, the Wagyu. Trahan reduced the stout, then added agar, a thickening agent derived from seaweed. After bringing it to a boil, he took it off the heat and added gelatin.

The agar holds the gelatin, which would otherwise melt on the hot plate, in place. It also adds a bitterness, along with the stout, that balances out some of the dish’s other flavors.

Trahan measured and poured the steamy brown liquid into a tray. He torched it, to pop all the bubbles, and put it in the fridge to set.

He pulled a different tray out of the fridge, with a veil he had prepared earlier and set. He used a pasta tool to slice it into perfect rectangles. Precision here is key, Trahan said. The whole dish is built around looking perfect.

Plating must happen quickly with the hot courses. Delivering lukewarm food to customers is not an option at a Michelin-starred restaurant. First on the plate goes a squirt of peanut cream, which was made from roasted peanuts steeped in half and half, set with agar and blended into pudding. The Wagyu, breaded in panko and deep fried, goes next. The veil is draped over it, and becomes like a translucent magic carpet, ferrying herbs and garnishes onto the plate.

Trahan added a bit of sunchoke with a dressing made from grapefruit peel, oil and xanthan gum for thickening. On top of the veil go malted peanuts and dehydrated sunchoke skin. There was also a grapefruit cube with herbs that include cilantro, two types of basil and coriander flowers placed strategically on top with tweezers.

Trahan uses tweezers to compose many of the courses at Ever. If plating a dish there is like conducting a symphony, tweezers are his baton. As he delicately placed each herb, he explained that every herb has a purpose.

“At first, it just seems like a bunch of herbs. But as you eat the dish, you’ll realize that every single bite comes out slightly different because of the refreshing flavor of the herbs as you explore,” he said. “It makes you keep coming back for another bite, because you’re interested in what’s coming next.”

This dish started with the idea of the classic peanut and lime flavor combination. Those roots come through strong in the first few bites of the dish, full of cilantro, peanut cream and citrus. 

The grapefruit flavors slice through the Wagyu’s fattiness. The panko crust on the beef adds a lovely crunchiness to the dish, which is the final savory course in the meal.

THIRD DISH: RICE PUDDING

To prepare Ever’s take on rice pudding, Trahan started by making the delicate sugar tuile that tops the dish. He used three types of sugar to create a powdered concoction, sifted it into circles on a pan and popped it in the oven to melt.

The tuiles came out of the oven looking like glass.

Duffy helped Trahan assemble the dish. The two put rice pudding into a round mold on a plate and began dotting it with dollops of red, yellow, green and creamy white sauce. Then, they pressed the tuiles on top.

During an Ever tasting, this take on rice pudding would be the eighth course — the first dessert of the evening, served right after the beef dish. Though the dessert’s is topped with a layer of sugar, it is not a sugar bomb. It is not overly rich. The tuile of sugar is delicate, adding a crunchy texture but not much flavor.

To eat, the diner cracks through the sugar tuile and tastes through the dish, getting different spurts of flavor from the sauces in each bite. The red sauce is hibiscus, yellow is passionfruit, white cream is banana, and the green is hoja santa, a leaf from Mexico that tastes like root beer.

Ever does not have a pastry chef. The desserts are made with techniques that overlap those used in the savory dishes. Like the preceding dishes, the rice pudding is an exploration. There is sporadic chewiness from bananas in the pudding, and varying pops of flavor in each bite. The passionfruit is tropical, the hoja santa brings an herby-ness, and the banana smooths it all out.