Abby Elliott as Natalie “Sugar” Berzatto in The Bear. | FX
Elliott shadowed a restaurant manager at a Pasadena, California location of Houston’s to prepare for playing Natalie Berzatto
The below contains plot details from Season 3 of The Bear.
Despite all the stereotypes about struggling actors working in restaurants, Abby Elliott, who plays Natalie Berzatto, the person tasked with managing all the chaos inside The Bear’s titular eatery, doesn’t actually bring any personal experience in the industry to the table.
In a 2023 interview with Today, Elliott said that she’s only ever held one restaurant job — a hostess gig — and she barely made it a week before quitting without even returning for her paycheck. And so when it came time to prepare for her role as Natalie, Elliott turned first to Unreasonable Hospitality, the book written by The Bear co-producer and prolific restaurateur Will Guidara, for insight into how front-of-house employees approach their work. But her most enlightening experience came when she shadowed a restaurant manager at the Pasadena, California location of Houston’s for a full night of service.
“It kind of blew my mind as an actor,” Elliott tells Eater. “Like, [actors] don’t know how to do math, and that was such a huge part of it. He went through the P&L with me, and he was just so thorough.” This kind of hands-on experience appears both in the script and behind the scenes on The Bear. Just as Cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) got shipped off to Ever to learn the hospitality ropes, Jeremy Allen White also attended an “intensive boot camp” at the Institute for Culinary Education in Los Angeles, where he learned how to chop, plate, and garnish like a real chef.
Elliott also points to her character’s Type A, detail-oriented personality as a perfect fit for working in a place like the Bear — and for a family like the Berzattos. In the early episodes of Season 3, we see Natalie in flashback scenes functioning as a support system for Carmy long before the restaurant even opens its doors. She sees him off to his new life as a chef in New York and offers him a little bit of cash to get started. Back in the present day, just after the Bear’s opening night, she’s intensely focused on the details of actually making the restaurant run, like hiring new staff and managing reservations. “Natalie likes to be organized and schedule things and do these tasks because it gives her purpose,” she says. “It also helps get her mind off her pregnancy, and her anxiety about becoming a mother.”
On some level, that’s a role that her place in both the Berzatto family and at the Bear have totally prepared Natalie for. She’s always been the one in charge of wrangling everyone and everything, and that continues in Season 3 as she manages the Bear’s finances and reservations and picking up paper towels, all while extremely pregnant. How she’ll handle all that after giving birth to her daughter remains to be seen in Season 4.
