Alpana Singh wears a Tiffany & Co.

In "Soubise," the second episode of The Bear's fourth season, a watch comes into view on Alpana Singh's wrist as she lifts a glass of red to taste. Singh is not playing a character. She is the sommelier who runs the Chicago restaurant where the scene was filmed, and the show has sent one of its own, Gary "Sweeps" Woods, to her to learn how wine changes as it ages. She tells him she thinks of a wine as a liquid snapshot of time.

The watch is a Tiffany & Co., small and steel on a matching bracelet with a pale dial, and it belongs to her. By the story Singh phoned in to the show's prop master, Laura Roeper, the day before the shoot, it is about twenty-five years old. She had moved to Chicago at twenty-three with a little early success behind her and wanted one object to mark the move and the path she was setting out on, so she walked into the Tiffany's on Michigan Avenue and bought it. She asked to wear it in the scene because, she said, it stood for what she was capable of doing.

She bought the symbol before she had earned the thing it stood for. Three years later, in 2003, she passed the Master Sommelier exam at twenty-six, the youngest woman ever to do it. She gave that title back in 2020, in solidarity with women who had reported harassment within the Court of Master Sommeliers, but she kept the watch, and when a film crew came to her restaurant she chose to wear it.