Bradley Cooper’s Character from Burnt Is Canon in The Bear

Did Bradley Cooper’s fictional chef from Burnt just become a canon character in FX’s The Bear? According to one eagle-eyed Season 3 viewer, the answer may just be a resounding “Yes, chef”.

“The new season of The Bear has a split-second shot of a photo of Bradley Cooper’s character in Burnt,” X user Patrick Willems shared, providing photographic evidence of the blink-and-you-miss-it moment during a Season 3 montage featuring clippings of chefs and restauranteurs. As a loving homage to the culinary world, The Bear has had its fair share of celebrity chefs playing themselves in cameo roles as well as non-chef celebrities like Joel McHale and Olivia Colman playing chefs; the series even delightfully employed celebrity chef Matty Matheson as one of the ensemble’s rare culinary layman. But a fictional chef from another universe is unchartered territory for The Bear. While Occam’s razor suggests that this moment was possibly just a fun Easter egg for audiences with Willem’s level of commitment to catch, an inside joke, or simply a reference to Cooper’s time in professional kitchens prepping for the film, it’s certainly entertaining to imagine that Burnt’s Adam Jones and The Bear’s Carmen Berzatto share a universe.

Though a far cry from the critical acclaim of The Bear, Burnt does happen to have a great deal of thematic overlap with the contemporary series. Much like Jeremey Allen White’s Carmy, Cooper portrays a tortured chef gunning for another Michelin star as he works on himself in the wake of a personal setback. Both temperamental fictional men even share a surface-level aesthetic, sans the tattoos. The Mary Sue points out an additional detail shared between the properties, as The Bear Season 3 features a scene where Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Richie zeroes in on a fork discarded on the titular restaurant’s floor, a tell-tale signifier of a Michelin reviewer according to Daniel Brühl’s Tony in Burnt.

While the image of Cooper in The Bear is undoubtedly ripped directly from Burnt‘s poster, the 2015 film was not the actor’s first time in the kitchen. In 2005, Cooper played a fictionalized version of Anthony Bourdain while starring in the sitcom adaptation of his memoir Kitchen Confidential. Though it’s unlikely Cooper will reprise Adam Jones or Jack Bourdain on The Bear, fans have had fun imagining a world where Carmy exists alongside other fictional chefs in the wake of Willems’ post. Crossovers between The Bear and Chef, The Menu, Ratatouille, and even the Muppets’ Swedish chef have been jokingly thrown about online, with X user Cynical Monkey cleverly dubbing these mashups the Michelin Cinematic Universe.