Lionel Boyce wears a Casio G-Shock

Marcus Brooks bends over the marble pass with a pair of tweezers, lowering a single garnish onto a glass dish. Lionel Boyce plays Marcus, the line cook who teaches himself pastry in The Bear, FX's 2022 series set in the kitchen of a Chicago restaurant. Laura Roeper has been the show's prop master since the first episode. "The entire show is based on time: every second counts," she told GQ, which is why a chef's watch reads less as jewelry than as a tool he uses to time the work.

In the early episodes Marcus wears a vintage Casio G-Shock, the resin watch that survives a kitchen because nothing about it is precious. It takes a drop and a soaking without complaint, and replacing one costs almost nothing. Roeper also uses the watches to mark a cook's trajectory, and Marcus does not stay in the Casio. Once he starts to take pastry seriously he moves up to a Tissot Gentleman Powermatic 80, a Swiss automatic with an eighty-hour reserve and a price many times the Casio's. The cheap watch is doing the same job as the expensive one: telling you, before Marcus says a word, how far along he is.