‘Carême’ is Apple TV’s Steamy French Answer to ‘The Bear’
April 30, 2025
It’s been a big week for French TV. Amy Sherman-Palladino fans got to binge an entire season of the highly-anticipated bilingual ballet world drama Étoile (though it didn’t exactly live up to the hype). Meanwhile, on Apple TV+, a spicy new French historical drama has just dropped its first two episodes.
Carême, named for the famed French chef Antonin Carême, takes some delightful liberties with the life of the man widely considered to be the world’s first celebrity chef. Set in the early 1800s, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s reign as First Consul of France, it follows our young hero as he strives to make a name for himself in the kitchens of the French aristocracy while being embroiled in their complex political machinations.
The show opens with a steamy scene involving a lot of whipped cream, setting the tone for what is to come: a sexy, decadent look into France’s Napoleonic era. Though the two harbor a deep hatred of the man who took charge of the country following the French Revolution, Carême and his father serve the First Consul and his soldiers, for whom hunger is just another appetite to be sated, along with a thirst for wine and women.
After a chance encounter with Bonaparte, in which Carême uses his knowledge of herbs and medicine to save the leader’s life, the chef is invited to work in the kitchens at the Tuileries. Though reluctant to accept the post on political grounds, his passion and enthusiasm for cooking at the highest level are palpable.
Taken under the wing of Talleyrand, a crafty politician who would become Bonaparte’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carême becomes known for his innovative dishes and elaborate culinary masterpieces. “The fine arts are five in number: music, painting, sculpture, poetry and architecture – of which the principal branch is confectionery,” Carême tells his adopted father Sylvain Bailly in the pilot, a real quote from the famed chef, whose fascination with architecture inspired the extravagant pastry displays, or pièces montées, that would become his signature.
However, it’s not just his pastries that catch the eye of France’s high and mighty. Carême is played by Benjamin Voison, whose magnetic performance in The Quiet Son I wrote about a couple months ago. Like a French Jacob Elordi, Voison has the luck to be both unreasonably handsome and wildly talented, allowing him to carry this series on his back with ease. While Carême luxuriates in his own private affair with Henriette (played by Lyna Khoudri, who you may recognize as Timothée Chalamet’s revolutionary love interest in The French Dispatch), he is coerced by Talleyrand into playing the role of honeypot in order to obtain information and influence policy under Napoleon’s rule. After all, Talleyrand tells him, “Cooking is very similar to seducing.”
The show does require a bit of a French history background to follow, though amid the political figures it also offers appearances from important culinary personas of the time, including Grimod de la Reynière, an early food critic and publisher of the Almanach des Gourmands, and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of the still-influential tome, The Physiology of Taste.
It is in the kitchen where the stakes feel highest, as Carême strives to impress these tastemakers while solving political problems through the medium of food. It lends the show an element of The Bear, particularly with the introduction of Carême’s sous chef, Agathe, a tough and highly skilled young woman who is something of a Sydney to Carême’s Carmy. (Don’t think the similarity of their names hasn’t gone unnoticed…)
Though Carême’s palace intrigue can get a little dense, it’s worth watching for Benjamin Voison and his slutty little earring alone. “Don’t forget it’s taste that catches customers, not good looks,” Bailly tells him early on. Well, much like our titular chef, I would have to disagree.
