Daniel Boulud wears a Rolex GMT-Master

The third season of The Bear opens on a quiet montage of the stages Carmy worked in other people's kitchens, before he ran anything of his own. One of those kitchens is Daniel Boulud's, and Boulud appears as himself, walking a young Carmen Berzatto through a dish with none of the show's usual shouting. Jeremy Allen White plays Carmy. Boulud plays the chef he is, the Lyon-born owner of the two-Michelin-star Daniel in New York, with restaurants under his name in other cities running while he sleeps in one of them.

On his wrist is a Rolex GMT-Master II in two-tone steel and gold. Rolex built the first GMT-Master in the 1950s for airline pilots: a 24-hour bezel and a second hour hand let the wearer read two time zones at once, the one he left and the one he landed in. New, the steel-and-gold version runs around 15,000 dollars. For a chef whose name is over doors on more than one continent, that second time zone is practical, the hour at a kitchen he is responsible for and cannot see.

By prop master Laura Roeper's account, almost every watch in The Bear is a deliberate choice about who a character is or is trying to become. Marcus the pastry cook trades his G-Shock for a Tissot as he starts to take the work seriously, and Chef Terry wears a men's Submariner that had to be fitted three times to stay on Olivia Colman's wrist. Boulud's Rolex is the exception. Roeper did not choose it, and neither did the costume truck: he and Thomas Keller, mentoring Carmy in the same sequence, wore the watches they already put on every morning. In a series that treats every passing second as a threat, the two chefs who made it long ago are the only ones whose watch no one on the production had to decide.