Lionel Boyce wears a Tissot Gentleman

Across the third season of The Bear, the camera keeps pressing in on the chefs' wrists, close enough to read the dials, and the prop department meant for it to. The show runs on time: a Chicago kitchen chasing a Michelin star, every plate against the clock. One of those wrists belongs to Marcus Brooks, the pastry chef, bent over a marble pass and setting a garnish with tweezers. Lionel Boyce plays him, the baker the series found at a beef-sandwich shop and has since moved onto the dessert station of the fine-dining restaurant that shop became.

The watch is new this season: a Tissot Gentleman Powermatic 80 with a deep green dial, reference T127.407.11.091.01. It is a 40mm steel automatic, water resistant to 100 meters, with a sapphire crystal and a movement Tissot calls the Powermatic 80 that runs about eighty hours off the wrist. It lists under a thousand dollars. For the first two seasons Marcus wore a vintage Casio G-Shock, the watch of a cook who has not arrived, and the Tissot is what replaced it.

Prop master Laura Roeper, on the show since the beginning, told GQ the swap was the point. Marcus had started taking the work seriously, so she put him in something aspirational but, by her own account, not ridiculous. The green was deliberate: blue, she said, was too common, and Marcus has style, so they wanted color. The price stayed under a thousand dollars because that is a watch a young cook might actually buy himself once the G-Shock came off.

By Roeper's reading a chef's watch is a status symbol and a stopwatch at once, a way to say you have arrived while timing eight plates with no kitchen timer to spare. The season sorts its cooks by wrist. Marcus's idol Luca wears an Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra; the real chefs who turn up, Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller, wear a Rolex GMT-Master and a Daytona, their own. Set against that GMT-Master and that Daytona, the green Tissot is the most modest watch the season puts on a working chef, and that ceiling is deliberate: Marcus is the one still climbing toward the Rolex that would mean he had arrived.