The scramble for perfection

How do you want your omelette? The French like it folded, the Sri Lankans add it toa curry. In Goa, it's served with xacuti. And The Bear is reinventing a classic

- VIR SANGHVI

In The Bear (2022), chef Sydney makes an omelette that has since gone viral. The trick is to encase the runny scramble in the egg-skin that develops at the bottom of the pan.

Very rarely does the cooking of a single dish become a craze or dominate popular culture and social media. But something like that has happened with the omelette from Season 2 of The Bear. It is now all over YouTube, which is full of how-to-reproduce-the-dish videos. Similar videos turn up on Instagram and Facebook.

If you are not familiar with The Bear, it's an American show about restaurateurs in Chicago. Its second season (the one with the omelette) won a record 23 Emmy nominations.

In Episode 9 of the second season, chef Sydney (played by Ayo Edebiri) makes an omelette for a colleague, and judging by the surprised response the scene has evoked, nobody in America bothers to cook a classic omelette any longer; which may be fair enough. It is difficult to get right. The trick is not the recipe but the process. The chef must cook scrambled eggs until, right at the end, when he or she must encase the runny scramble in the thin egg-skin that has developed at the bottom of the pan. The eggs must still be a little liquidy in the centre and the skin must be delicate but hold the eggs in.

In a classic French kitchen, an omelette can be the test of how good a chef is. The technique is the key.