M
atty Matheson is driving down memory lane in a green 1963 Ford Galaxie. The skies above Fort Erie, Ontario, are gray, obscuring the Buffalo skyline across the lake. He points out some of the town’s landmarks.
“That building over there is where I was served my first beer,” says Matheson, clad in flannel shirt, trucker cap, and slip-on shoes. The clothes semi-cover his comprehensively tatted body, which recently found room for the names of his three kids, MacArthur, Rizzo, and Ozzy.
The chef and restaurateur turned Vice star turned The Bear producer and actor grew up here, but now lives with his wife and three kids in neighboring Ridgeway, about 10 minutes away. It’s an important distinction. Fort Erie bursts with American tourists in the summertime, but today is empty on a gray May morning. We pull into a parking space in a desolate part of town formerly dotted with strip clubs, not far from the factory where his mom once worked debriding airplane wings.
“The kids from Ridgeway would come here on the weekends,” says Matheson. “We knew everybody, so they stood out. My brother and I would fight with them every weekend.” He cracks a grin, remembering days of drugs, booze, and getting pepper sprayed by the cops. “We weren’t bullies, we were just scrappy.”
Matheson speaks in a quiet, thoughtful way. It is the vox opposite of the frenetic and high-pitched Neil Fak, the happily incompetent handyman who provides comic relief amidst the Michelin-starred angst on The Bear (Season Four is streaming now).
Matheson bought the Galaxie last year. He loves it despite some manic pixie car quirks, a.k.a. windows that won’t open, possessed blinkers, and audio provided by an iPhone and portable JBL speaker that was not a factory option.
“I think it’s bitching,” says Matheson. I search for and do not find seatbelts in the worn upholstery. “It’s a great family car. My kids love it. It’s a classic.”
You could say Matheson has returned to the classics after years on a gravel-road joy ride that made and nearly ended him. More on that later. Now, Matheson is remembering his childhood on Prince Edward Island where his Grampy Matheson ran the Blue Goose, a roadside diner on the Trans Canada Highway. Grampy only had a one-bedroom apartment attached to the restaurant, so Matheson and his siblings would sleep on the banquettes on summer and holiday visits while his parents crashed on a pull-out sofa in the diner’s office.
“I remember him making fresh dinner rolls every day,” says Matheson. “He made all his chowders and bisques and soups and their turkey dinner. It opened at 6 a.m. so we had to wake up early. There really wasn’t any separation between the restaurant and family.” Matheson smiles at the memory. “And I loved it.”
MATHESON’S TWENTIES READ like the lyrics to a metal punk band song. Matter of fact, Matheson’s friends in the metal band Cancer Bats wrote a song about him called “Dead Set on Life”: “The day the doctor told me, Son, you’re gonna die/If you continue to live like this /You’ve got another year at best.”
Matheson moved to nearby Toronto at 19 and tried to recreate the Grampy lifestyle with a new family jerry rigged from the geniuses and misfits in the Toronto food world. He went to culinary school, played in punk bands — he has a WWDD tattoo on his finger for “what would Dee Dee Ramone do” — and consumed massive quantities of brown liquor and unlicensed pharmaceuticals. Eventually, it became impossible to separate his kitchen and partying skills; they were Siamese twin components of Matheson’s Falstaffian personality.
It all worked until it didn’t, and Matheson suffered a heart attack at 29. The health crisis initially provided him with a let’s say counterintuitive revelation: Life is short, so I’d better enjoy the fuck out it and party even harder. Bottom was hit two years later, in 2013, when he happily accepted a bag of coke from his dealer in front of customers at Toronto’s Parts & Labour restaurant, where Matheson served as executive chef. Thankfully, his wife, Trish, Matheson’s high-school sweetheart, stood by him, and his few remaining restaurant friends staged an intervention not long after. Matheson has now been clean for almost 12 years.
The initial challenge, besides staying alive, was figuring out how to still be “Matty Matheson” without all the potions and powders. It was especially tricky since Matheson’s party monster persona had started to pay the bills. He was moving into video, winning a best cheeseburger contest on a Canadian competition show called Burger Wars, and then on YouTube shows including Hangover Cures, where Matheson would get trashed with his friends and then concoct, yes, a hangover cure meal.
Now, he had to do it sober. It wasn’t as hard as he thought it would be. He went to work for Vice and created Dead Set on Life for Viceland, the title taken from the Cancer Bats song. The show featured Matheson traveling the world in various Matty-out-of-water scenarios that included Matheson dancing with indigenous Canadians in full war dress. He was still Matheson, a wise clown dropping f-bombs — a Toronto magazine counted 150 in a single episode — and branching into video-Hunter S. Thompson territory covering a Canadian federal election.
“If you watch my first few cooking videos, there is no persona,” Matheson tells me as he steers the Galaxie toward Rizzo’s House of Parm, Matheson’s Italian joint named after his daughter and located just a few miles from his home. “There is no nothing. It’s just me. I figured out if I built this thing, then I can turn it on and turn it off. I can say, ‘OK, I’m in front of a camera. I can become loud. I can say stupid stuff.’”
Matheson says all this in a quiet voice that battles with the Galaxie’s engine. “The way I am today is the way I am in real life.” He chuckles. “Also, now I have three kids. I’m forty-fucking-three.”
THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER landing in a Toronto ICU unit, Matty Matheson was wearing a tux in Hollywood and holding an Emmy as The Bear won Outstanding Comedy Series. Matheson was given the honor of making the acceptance speech, which was momentarily delayed by co-star Ebon Moss-Bachrach planting a lengthy kiss on his lips.
Then he spoke.
“I just love restaurants so much — the good, the bad,” Matheson said. “It’s rough. We’re all broken inside, and every single day, we’ve got to show up and cook and make people feel good by eating something and sitting at a table, and it’s really beautiful.”
Matheson’s remarks are a good distillation of The Bear, which centers around Carmy Berzatto, played by Jeremy Allen White, returning home to Chicago from a globe-trotting life working at Michelin-starred restaurants. Carmy takes over the family’s Italian beef restaurant after his brother’s suicide. The show was created by Christopher Storer, whose sister Courtney is a chef. Courtney knew Matheson from the restaurant circuit and asked him to consult on the show.
“At first, it was mostly about making the restaurant seem real,” says Matheson. “The restaurant is struggling, so I told them, ‘No way they have this many pans or their freezer would be so full, they wouldn’t be able to afford it.’”
Friends of mine who have worked in restaurants marvel at how The Bear gets the culinary ecosystem just right; the temperamental geniuses, the adrenaline-junkie moments in the kitchen at 8 p.m. on a Saturday, the shedding of family and relationships in service of an all-consuming lifestyle. I ask Matheson what he meant by saying “we are all broken” in his Emmy speech.
“I think the show that we’re making is a perfect example of that,” says Matheson. “Carmy’s brother took his life. [So Carmy is] put in a situation of life on life’s terms. He’s not in control. None of us are. The downfall of Carmy is that he goes home when he doesn’t really want to go home, but it also saves him. The team at the restaurant believe in him but also are like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ And that creates accountability.”
“I missed funerals, weddings, fucking birthdays. I missed every single Mother’s Day. Because I wanted
to be a chef.“
Matheson grimaces a bit.
“I can relate to that.”
This is all true and poignant, but let’s face it, this is television, and viewers love Matheson not for his culinary fact-checking, but for the manic lovability he brings to Fak. Though Matheson had never acted before, the creative team almost immediately got the idea to cast him. Matheson had one condition: “I just didn’t want to play a chef.” Everyone agreed, he says, “that playing a guy who doesn’t know how to use a screwdriver would be funny, since I don’t know how to use a screwdriver.” This stipulation granted, Storer and company trusted Matheson enough that he appears in the pilot’s first moments. The performance channels his video persona. “The first scene I shot, they said ‘action,’” Matheson says, “and I just started laughing because it all seemed so absurd.”
On the show, Fak is sometimes pressed into front-of-house duties. There’s a scene where a petrified Fak carries broth and two bowls out to a table on a tray. He ceremoniously pours the broth into two bowls as the diners look on with anticipation. He then returns to the kitchen with the bowls, having forgotten to leave them for the patrons. I ask him if something like that had ever happened at one of his restaurants.
“Not really, but once we plated a salad and took it out to the table. A few seconds later, we hear a scream,” says Matheson. “Turns out there was a tiny praying mantis that just blended in and no one caught it.”
Each season, Matheson gets a little more screen time, especially after the introduction of Teddy Fak, his onscreen brother. Teddy is played by Ricky Staffieri, a Chicago local who started on the show as a crew member. “I love Ricky so much,” says Mattheson, who was leaving Fort Erie in a few days for Los Angeles, where he would be producing and financing a short film by Staffieri. While many of Neil and Teddy’s scenes seem like improvised riffing, Matheson insists it is all pre-written by Storer and his team.
He is proud of one contribution. The show’s iconic episode is Season Two’s “Fishes,” a flashback to a profoundly dysfunctional Berzatto Christmas dinner that won Emmys for guest stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Jon Bernthal while also featuring Bob Odenkirk, Sarah Paulson, and John Mulaney. Amongst all the dross and angst, Neil and Teddy try to talk everyone into investing in a baseball-card trading venture that might generate $500 in profits after a year. (Mulaney’s character agrees to invest solely on the premise that the stories of how the Fak brothers lost his money will be hilarious.)
“We pitched that,” says Matheson with pride. “We were like, ‘Yo, what if we just started pitching every character to get in on our baseball hustle?’ Chris loved it, and it turned into a bit. We’re like, ‘We’ll do Bernthal, we’ll do Mulaney.’ We turned it into something that evened off a lot of tension. We’ve become this velvet hammer within the chaos of this family. A lot of that is Ricky. He changed my life.”
One of the recurring themes of The Bear is artist chefs forgetting why they got into cooking in the first place, replacing solid good meals with magical-realist creations that bear only a passing semblance to actual food. On the road, Matheson and I are not far from one of his touchstones, the Robo Mart, a combo gas station-sandwich shop where he would religiously place the same order: a chicken-finger sandwich smothered in sauce.
“When I was 27, at the height of me being this chef in Toronto, I would never put a chowder on [the menu] and just make a basic chowder that was really good,” says Matheson, rolling his eyes. “I’d have to throw a bunch of stupid shit in there, just ego-driven shit. Now I try to take the ego out of everything and just be like, ‘What do people genuinely want to eat?’ And I think it’s simple things.” Like his chicken-finger sandwich. “So it becomes, how can I make these simple things great every time.”
I mention a scene in The Bear where a notorious chef urges Carmy to “subtract.”
“Yeah, it’s all about restraint,” says Matheson. “If it doesn’t add to the story, it takes away.”
We pull into Rizzo’s, one of six restaurants that Matheson owns. Matty happily cops to having ADHD, but he’s replaced the adrenaline-pursuing deathtrap of getting high with more positive endeavors that include but are not limited to the television show, bestselling cookbooks, and a clothing line for larger men. Oh yeah, he’s also playing dates as lead singer of the hardcore band Pigpen.
The restaurant in The Bear is driven and nearly destroyed by dysfunctional behavior. That’s not Rizzo’s. There’s a noticeable lack of tension as the staff preps for the dinner crowd. Matheson says hello and grabs some fresh bread and olive oil from the kitchen.
“The older I get, the more when I get to a town I want to find the oldest steakhouse where I can eat and hang out with my friends and family,” says Matheson. “I’ll just go to the same three restaurants where I feel comfortable and happy.”
Rizzo’s is that kind of place for his family.
“My kids love it here,” he says. “Rizzo likes to get dressed up as a princess when we come here.”
He goes quiet for a moment. “Mental health is a tough thing that now we can talk about,” says Matheson, referencing his dark years. “I come from a place where nobody talked about it. Even as loving and amazing as my parents are, I never had sit-downs about ‘how do I feel’ with my father. He was endlessly encouraging and stuff like that, but we never had heart-to-hearts.” He smiles. “I have heart-to-hearts with my kids every day, sometimes here.”
“I try to honor the people that are in my family, who helped make me. All my restaurants now are based on everyone in my life.”
Matheson seems to be in a good place, but he knows that the path from Toronto culinary bad boy to family man has not come without a cost.
“I cooked every day for 15 years,” says Matheson. “I missed funerals, I missed weddings, I missed fucking birthdays. I missed every single Mother’s Day. I missed every single thing.”
His eyes well with emotion but without tears.
“I asked my chef to take time off to go to my grandfather’s funeral in Prince Edward Island,” says Matheson. “He said, ‘If you go, you’re done.’ And I called my parents, like, ‘I need this job. I don’t have a financial security blanket.’ And I missed his fucking funeral because I wanted to be a chef.”
Whenever Matheson is on Prince Edward Island, he visits Grampy’s grave to “say ‘what up.’” He pays respect to Grampy in other ways: The organic farm behind his Ridgeway house is called Blue Goose Farms, and Bar Clams, a Matheson restaurant in Toronto, has seafood dishes based on his grandfather’s recipes.
“I think that’s a part of me honoring him,” says Matheson. “I try to honor the people that are in my family, who helped make me.” He gestures at Rizzo’s. “This place honors Tricia. She’s Italian. All my restaurants now aren’t some idea I conjured up but are based on everyone in my life.”
A few minutes later, Matheson tells me has to go. He’s leaving Rizzo’s to go see the actual Rizzo sing a Wicked medley with her glee club.
“I can’t miss that,” says Matheson.
Grampy lives.
Production Credits
Photo Assistance PAT OSLOZ
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