Learn What Chaos Cooking Is Before Watching The Bear Season 2

If you've seen the season 2 trailer of Hulu's "The Bear," you might feel curious about what "chaos cooking" really is. Continuing from last season, Chef Carmen "Carmy" Berzatt and sous chef Sydney Adamu plan to transform the Italian beef sandwich shop into a trendy destination restaurant with a chaos menu. Or, as Carmy puts it in the trailer, "chaos, but thoughtful."

You may wonder how chaos cooking is different from fusion cooking. The trend combines foods that you wouldn't necessarily think go together, like Big Mac pizza and tandoori spaghetti. While this is similar to fusion (you're literally fusing different food groups), there's more experimentation in chaos cooking without needing to stay true to any one cuisine. Instead of focusing on merging food from different cultures, as in fusion cooking, chaos is weird and subversive, prompting you to lighten up about cooking. (Think of the Pringles mashed potatoes that went viral on TikTok.)

While becoming more popular in 2023, the term chaos cooking seems to have evolved over the years. Joe Che is sometimes credited for creating the concept in 2009. In his small New York City apartment, Che organized dinner parties where every guest was also the cook, describing it as a "culinary flash mob" (per Edible Brooklyn). Each guest would bring ingredients for one dish — kind of like a potluck where everyone cooks together. The process — which often included 50 cooks creating a meal in a tiny Brooklyn kitchen — was unpredictable, as was the end result. 

The concept of chaos dinner parties spread beyond Brooklyn to other cities and states. In 2013, Austin's South by Southwest festival began hosting Chaos Cooking events.

Like all colloquial terms, the meaning evolves over time. People use chaos cooking to make hybrid meals, but also to describe an approach to creating new dishes. While Joe Che's definition applies to experimenting with a more free-form community approach to planning and preparing a meal, chefs with a chaos menu don't invite their guests to roll up their sleeves and cook. They use an intuitive and playful approach to experimenting with combining flavors, textures, and techniques.

We'll see how Chef Carmy creates his chaos menu in the second season of "The Bear." It may draw on the character's culinary training while incorporating aspects of his brother's Chicago sandwich joint, or perhaps they will create something completely new. Season 2 will debut on June 22.