Is The Lemon Chicken Piccata On ‘The Bear’ As Tasty As It Looks? We Made It To Find Out

With The Bear still going strong on streaming, we wondered whether Carmy’s eye-catching chicken recipe could really be the dinner item that helped keep the restaurant afloat. It’s not a super common order these days but it did look sexy when he spooned butter on top of a sizzling cutlet. Butter and meat — surefire win… right

Friends, today we’re making lemon chicken piccata!

Before we dive in, lemon chicken piccata — more often just called “chicken piccata” — is very old-school. The dish is pretty common across Italy, unlike rigatoni al vodka which is more common here. “Piccata” is simply a “thin cutlet” that’s usually either veal or chicken and shallow fried. Generally in Italy, you’d order a “piccata di vitello al limone” for a light pan-fried veal cutlet in lemon sauce. The dish is a “secondo” course, which means it’s the meat/fish dish served after the pasta course and not with it.

Naturally, there are as many variations in Italy as there are regions and kitchens. Over time, Italian-American kitchens shorthanded that recipe to mean either veal or chicken cutlet (also lightly shallow pan-fried) and served with a pan sauce with capers and parsley and a smidge of lemon. The latter recipe — the classic Italian American version — is what we’re looking at today.

While Chicken Piccata might sound new and fresh (Carmy certainly thinks it’s a winner), the dish has had its ups and downs over the centuries from a holiday dish in Italian-American households in the early 20th century to a light alternative to the heavy red sauces in Italian restaurants up and down the East Coast in the 1950s to home cooks in the 1970s bringing it back and so on and so on until we reach 2022 where a TV show on Hulu made it popular again.

But is this Italian-American relic really worth passing along through generations It certainly has lasted the ages so there’s got to be something there that people keep going back to. Though, that’s kind of an easy thing to answer — it’s lightly fried chicken cutlet in a butter-heavy pan sauce with a nice hit of lemon. What’s not to like

Well… that depends on how you like capers.

Since we’re pro capers around these parts, we grabbed the recipe from Matty Matheson, the actual food consultant on the show, and followed that while adding a little more flare — it needed way more lemon and parsley to liven it up, IMO. Let’s see if it’s worth adding it to your own dinner rotation, cousin!

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Serves 4 (on the show Carmy makes a single serving so the ratios are not the same as listed below)

Ingredients:

What You’ll Need:

Method:

Bottom Line:

Overall, this was a good dinner course — though I probably overdid it on the parsley (I blame Steve Bramucci’s influence over the years). I ended up serving it with white rice, which really worked well in absorbing the butter/lemon pan sauce. All told, it took about 45 minutes from beginning to table to make, which isn’t terrible for a weeknight meal but a little long.

When it comes to the flavors… yeah, this is nice. I can see why it endured. Again, it’s chicken in a lemon-caper sauce with — did I mention — a lot of butter. The chicken was juicy and had a good crunch to the outside that kept its bite even after sauced and while eating.

The sauce was earthy and lemony with a nice sweet and sharp garlic bite. The parsley added to the earthiness of the capers while the lemon kept the whole sauce and chicken bright. There was a nice balance of acids and fats that played well with the light bitterness from the capers.

In the end, this still felt very standard. It was good but not something that I’d ever think might help save my restaurant — unless it was literally 1953. It tasted like it was from a bygone era. Not in a bad way, mind you. It’s more like going back to your favorite childhood Italian joint and realizing your parents took you to eat there because it was affordable, not mind-blowing.

Will I cook this again Sure (with less parsley from my end) — probably with veal next time, though. If you want to try Matheson’s exact version, it can be found below.