If you liked The Bear, you really should try this English kitchen drama

Boiling Point
SBS on demand (in full), SBS Thursdays at 9.30pm
★★★★

If you’ve seen The Bear, Disney’s multi-Emmy-winning series about life in the kitchen of a Chicago sandwich shop turned would-be, high-end restaurant, you might dismiss the terrific English series Boiling Point as a cheap knock-off. But you’d be wrong. On both counts.

This is no inferior product, although it is a bit different to the American show that made Jeremy Allen White the hottest thing since sliced brioche. And it’s no imitator either, since it came first.

Vinette Robinson as Carly in Boiling Point.Credit: James Stack/BBC Studios

Philip Barantini, who co-created the series with James Cummings, had his first stab at directing this fly-on-the-wall piece of verite drama in 2019, as a short film. It starred Stephen Graham as harried chef Andy Jones and was shot in a single 20-minute take.

In 2021 (the year before The Bear debuted), the team behind it revisited the territory as a feature film. Shot again as a single take of 92 minutes (The Bear famously did a single-take episode in its first season, but it ran for just 18 minutes), it ended with Andy, the head chef and co-owner of Jones & Sons, suffering a massive heart attack during an incredibly stressful service. The endless fights with his staff, a harsh review from a health inspector, and his fondness for snorting coke and swigging vodka probably didn’t help matters.

Band of brothers and sisters: The Point North crew.Credit: SBS

Now, in this four-part series from 2023, Andy is but a background character, caught in occasional glimpses as he tries to work out what his life is now that running a kitchen appears to be off the table. The focus is instead on Carly (Vinette Robinson), his former sous chef.

She’s now running a place of her own, Point North, and is trying to carve out a piece of the high-end gastronomic pie with a fancy spin on northern staples (fish and chips, stews etc).

She’s inherited a bunch of the staff from Andy’s old place – including pastry chef Emily (Graham’s real-life wife Hannah Walters) and her junior, Jamie (Stephen McMillan), the French import Camille (Izuka Hoyle), the hot-headed Freeman (Ray Panthaki), and front-of-house stars Dean (Gary Lamont), the flamboyant restaurant manager and occasional DJ, and Robyn (Aine Rose Daly), an aspiring actress.

The camera is fluid and intimate, but the single-take conceit has been abandoned. The hour-long episodes occasionally get outside of the kitchen, indeed outside of the restaurant entirely, which is a significant departure from the earlier versions of Boiling Point.

But the intensity of the hospo life remains its focus. The tension, the pressure, the clashes and the camaraderie.It’s a war zone, every night, and the survivors are both scarred and bonded by it.

Barantini used to work in commercial kitchens, starting at the bottom and working his way up to head chef over 12 years. Boiling Point positively drips with the authenticity born of that experience.

There are moments when the sheer drama of it all seems a bit much – can one workplace really harbour so much addiction, poverty, mental health issues and sexual harassment (answer: probably). But everyone involved in Boiling Point goes about it with such absolute conviction that you might not even notice how overloaded your plate is until you’ve licked it clean.

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