What is the Feast of the Seven Fishes in The Bear Season 2? - Food Files

Jul 25, 2023

Join us for a deep dive.

This far into season 2 of The Bear, we should be accustomed to tension and drama. However, if you’ve ever been to a holiday dinner with your family, you’ll know there are plenty of minefields left to navigate. Which is precisely where we kick things off in episode 6 of season 2, ‘Fishes.’

We’re introduced to the Berzatto’s during a typically chaotic Christmas Eve family dinner where an adequately unhinged Jamie Lee Curtis portrays Donna, the drunk mother frantically trying to prepare the Feast of the Seven Fishes. It’s not going well.

Source: FX disney+

The chain-smoking Donna is flapping through the kitchen, trying to time seven fish courses with one stovetop and a crammed oven, the scene staccatoed by intermittent timers buzzing, and Carmy doing his best to bring things down to a simmering point.

For all the trauma involved in the seven fishes ritual, and the eventual inspiration it provides Carmy for his present-day menu, there’s a whole lot of assumed knowledge. So what exactly is the Feast of the Seven Fishes? We’re glad you asked.

Cured ocean trout

Originating in Sicily where it is known as The Vigil (La Vigilia), the festa dei sette pesci is an Italian-American tradition held on Christmas Eve, where seven seafood courses are prepared to represent the wait – or, the vigil – for the midnight birth of Jesus. There is a long Roman Catholic tradition of eating seafood on Christmas Eve, and abstaining from eating meat on the eve of a feast day.

As with many Italian-American traditions, the roots in Italy are relatively tenuous however that hasn’t stopped the ritual taking on a life of its own across Italian-American families in the US. Popular dishes served range from baccalà salad, clams casino, and oyster shooters, to stuffed-baked lobsters, octopus salad, fried eel and branzino (seabass).

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The popularisation of the Feast of the Seven Fishes lies in muddy waters however it’s largely accepted that the first known mention of the US lore was in The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1983. It also became the title of a graphic novel by Robert Tinnell in 2005 before being made into a feature film in 2019.

A new-world ‘tradition’ embroiled with family drama, the Feast of the Seven Fishes is a surprise example of how the seemingly inconsequential moments in our past mould us, and can make or break our futures. Carmy, in the vein of his migrant Italian ancestors, has reinvented the feast for his own menu and created something new, that is beautiful in a very unique way.