Sometimes ravioli isn’t just ravioli.

For Sydney Adamu, it’s a feverish vision, an acute longing for the perfect dish.

Ingredients flash through her mind, mingling with scenes from her childhood — tastes, smells, pictures, memories, family.

Because TV’s “The Bear” isn’t just about food, restaurants and stressed-out chefs — it’s a show about the creative process, and everything it takes to get there.

A successful dish, whether perfect or not, isn’t limited to tasting good. It has to tell a story.

That’s also why people have absolutely inhaled “The Bear.” The FX-produced Hulu series, which made fast fans in its first season last summer, has fired up an electrifying second course that channels the energy of its debut into new spaces and journeys. Critics have rejoiced, while FX trumpeted that season two, released June 22, was its most-watched premiere.

Joanna Calo can’t tell her own food story without Jersey.

When she thinks of home, she thinks tuna on a bagel.

“The center of my New Jersey food life was the Bagel Chateau,” says Calo, co-showrunner, writer, director and executive producer of the red-hot series that has audiences hankering for more.

From her childhood home, she could walk to the bagel shop in Maplewood’s “village.”

Calo, now 42, was there every day of her senior year at Columbia High School.

“Every single day, and truly still dream of it,” she says from Los Angeles, where Emmy nominations will be announced July 12.

“The Bear,” which premiered in June 2022, missed the cutoff for that year’s awards show. Now that the first season is eligible, fanfare for the second season may bode well for the show’s Emmy prospects. The show, which won an Independent Spirit Award for best new scripted series, has enjoyed a response on the level of old-fashioned watercooler chatter.

“I’m so grateful that people watch,” Calo tells NJ Advance Media. “I love that people can like something at the same time. I think these days, that’s harder, and it does really connect us.”

The adrenaline-pumping series began with anguished chef Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White, who won a Golden Globe, SAG Award and Critics’ Choice Award for the role); passionate sous-chef Sydney (Independent Spirit Award winner Ayo Edebiri); Carmy’s volatile “cousin” Richie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach); and the scrappy, devoted team hustling to keep sandwich shop The Original Beef of Chicagoland afloat after the death of former owner Mikey Berzatto, Carmy’s brother.

In the second season, they try to work a miracle, embarking on a high-stakes mad dash to renovate and reopen the restaurant as The Bear — an experiment in fine dining.

The hallmark of the show is rapid-fire dialogue — “Yes, Chef!” — that immediately dials the tension to its highest flame.

From the jump, series creator Christopher Storer committed to the tone, one informed by real chefs and restaurant kitchens.

“He saw that that’s how these people talk, and that’s what we wanted to capture,” Calo says.

These days, “The Bear” TikTok parodies mimic Carmy and Sydney’s exchanges with the restaurant staff.

“I don’t look at it that much. I’ll be honest, it’s so surreal, it, like, hurts my brain a little bit,” Calo says, laughing.

The frenzy of the show can get so intense, some agita may be on the menu for viewers. She takes that as a compliment.

“It helps you feel something,” Calo says. “I think watching things and feeling things is good. We all have shows that we watch and don’t feel anything. I wouldn’t exchange that for the world. But I think there’s something really special about making people feel anxious and sad and good ... just to be alive.”

Chaos on the menu

Calo wrote one episode this season (”Pasta”) and co-wrote two others (”Fishes,” “Omelette”).

In speaking to NJ Advance Media, she is focusing on her work as a director on the show, because of the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike.

“The Bear” is filmed in its home city of Chicago, which grants the dramedy authenticity. But it’s the characters, with all of their sharp edges and edgy interactions, that make the show so watchable.

In one episode Calo directed, “Pop” (episode 5), the slightly reformed but frequently combative Richie delivers a little self-analysis to Carmy’s sister, renovation project manager Natalie “Sugar” Berzatto (Abby Elliott). She wouldn’t mind getting him out of her hair entirely — they grew up together, so he may as well be a third brother — but she hears him out.

“I’m not like this ‘cause I’m in Van Halen,” Richie tells her. “I am in Van Halen because I’m like this.”

There is a sense that despite all the potentially destructive effects of the constant pressure to deliver, these people crave the crucible that is the restaurant. It calls to them — so much so that at some point, any chaos might start to look like balance.

Calo says the creative team behind the show has been happy to hear that working chefs and restaurant employees can identify with the characters.

“We feel very lucky that this community does feel like they’re reflecting them correctly,” she says. “But I also think a lot of jobs are like this.

“What I love about Richie is that especially in this season, he’s finding a purpose, but a lot of people go to work and work hard and it’s not about becoming the best. It’s not about trying to get somewhere or trying to get a Michelin star. It’s just about trying to show up, do the day’s work and have your community, and I think that’s also true here ... they’re together because they’re f---ed up, but they’re also just together ... there’s a lot of honor in just getting through the day.”

The charged intimacy in “The Bear” often arrives in searing close-ups.

“So much of the look of our show is designed by Chris,” Calo says. “I’m a new director, and he is teaching me so much. But I will say that we kind of realized that our show looks very good in close-up. Our actors’ faces are really fun to look at.”

In the third episode, “Sundae,” which Calo directed, Sydney’s face and sometimes just her eyes fill the frame. The chef, now Carmy’s business partner and chef de cuisine in the new restaurant, engages all of her senses on a quest to build the flavors and story of The Bear’s menu, including the precious ravioli she sees so vividly in her mind.

“I loved using the super, super, super close-up to just try to help the audience get inside Sydney’s mind,” Calo says.

The episode also strikingly depicts Sydney’s creative process in devising a dish, imagining a surface where ingredients are tossed and mixed with sense and memory.

“We started talking about it as almost like a ‘Sesame Street’ episode ... how to build a building, or how to make a crayon, those kinds of random childhood inspirations ... We were very lucky in that we had some very talented editors who I think pulled it off for us.”

Another memorable scene arrives when Carmy has a moment with childhood crush, Claire (Molly Gordon).

In Calo’s “Pop,” the love interest joins him at the restaurant and is framed by a cutout in the wall, signifying a shift in focus for the chef.

Calo says she wanted to give the episode’s romance a big-screen feel.

“A gorgeous close-up with some glowy light is just very classic romantic comedy, which is what I was really trying to reference,” she says. “We had a really fun time watching teen comedies, and especially Chicago teen movies like ‘Sixteen Candles’ (1984) and ‘Risky Business’ (1983).”

One of the show’s related needle drops is “Pretty in Pink” by the Psychedelic Furs, among lots of post-punk, R.E.M. (the band released a remix of “Strange Currencies” for the show) and The Replacements. Calo also took cues from ’90s favorites “My So-Called Life” and “Jerry Maguire.”

Food, family and freakouts

Just when “The Bear” seems like it has throughly roasted, diced and shredded its characters, there’s another story to be told.

But the hour-plus, star-studded Christmas episode “Fishes” (for “Feast of the Seven Fishes”), co-written by Calo and Storer, is an aggressively uncomfortable Berzatto family powder keg.

The prequel boasts guest stars Jamie Lee Curtis, Bob Odenkirk, Jon Bernthal, Gillian Jacobs, Sarah Paulson and John Mulaney. Their holiday gathering amounts to a house-sized pot furiously boiling over with rage, dread, love, pain, regret, addiction ... and recklessly thrown utensils.

Oscar winner Curtis anchors the mix of marquee talent in grand fashion as explosive matriarch Donna Berzatto (she was a fan of the first season, Calo says). Bernthal reprises the role of Mikey Berzatto, whose private agony shows up in a dinner table standoff. To witness the family’s past is to better understand Carmy and Sugar’s scars, while wanting to flee the room and get some air.

Who wouldn’t like to revisit such a heart-stabbing tale every yuletide?

“We wanted to put it out separate as a Christmas special because I think there’s something so funny about adding that to your Christmas list,” Calo says.

The writer, director and producer was born in Oakland, California. When she was 8, she moved with her family to Maplewood, where she lived until she was 18. Her parents left town when she graduated from high school.

“My sister and I wish we could move back,” she says.

Today Calo lives in LA with her husband, writer Eli Bauman (The Emmys, “44: The Unofficial, Unsanctioned Obama Musical”), and their daughter, 4, and son, 2.

Lauryn Hill and Zach Braff graduated Columbia High School in 1993, just a few years ahead of Calo.

“There’s something going on there,” she says of her alma mater. “Something positive is making creative people feel that they’ll be OK if they continue to explore those things in their lives.”

She was keenly aware of and moved by the connection — photos featured in Hill’s iconic 1998 album “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” were taken at the high school, and Braff filmed his 2004 directorial debut, “Garden State,” in South Orange.

“He was doing what I wanted to do,” Calo says. “He was making a movie about our town and using our town and it was all kind of confusing and also very inspiring.”

Calo worked as a writers’ assistant for a decade before breaking into writing, producing and directing.

Prior to “The Bear,” the Emmy nominee wrote and produced Netflix’s adult animated series “BoJack Horseman” and “The Baby-Sitters Club” reboot, as well as Max’s “Hacks,” and Amazon’s “Undone” (another adult animated series).

She made her debut as both a showrunner and director in the first season of “The Bear” (helming episodes 3, 5 and 6), taking breaks to pump breastmilk for her newborn son.

Yes, Chefs — lots of them

Calo intends to make a trip back to Jersey to enjoy the bagel paradise of her youth.

Of course, there’s also her favorite pizza spot in town — Roman Gourmet.

“The food was really good in Maplewood,” she says.

The food is also really good in Chicago.

Calo got to take full advantage of that fact when she directed the “Sundae” episode, in which Sydney takes a culinary tour of Chicago.

The character eats and eats some more, making notes and visiting the city’s best spots, culminating in that sundae in the episode’s title, cherry and all.

“It’s this creative journey, which is indulgent and special and beautiful,” Calo says. “We really wanted to just take a moment to talk about how chefs get their inspiration.”

The idea came from two of the show’s producers, real chefs Courtney Storer, sister of the series creator, and Canadian restaurateur Matty Matheson who plays handyman Neil Fak, another honorary member of the Berzatto family.

“One of the things they’ve talked about is just going out into the world, like on a rare day off you go and you eat,” Calo says.

The excursion temporarily extricates Sydney from the increasingly calamitous situation back at the old Beef. She has dreams of a Michelin star for their new venture, but mold, wood rot, termites, roaches and dead raccoons are standing in the way.

Sydney seeks advice from prominent real-life Chicago restaurateurs like Donnie Madia, a partner in One Off Hospitality, known for Avec, The Violet Hour, Publican, Big Star and Dove’s Luncheonette.

Guest chefs are played by Rob Levitt of Publican Quality Meats, brothers Daniel Wat and Eric “Chops” Wat of Lao Peng You, Avec’s Dylan Patel and Elske’s David Posey.

Genie Kwon and Tim Flores — who just won best chef, Great Lakes at the James Beard Awards for their work at Kasama, the first Michelin-starred Filipino restaurant — also opened their doors to “The Bear.”

“It was really, really special that they let us come in and not only mess up their business for the day, but but also share their stories with us,” Calo says.

Scenes in the fifth episode feature plates crafted by ceramicist Jono Pandolfi, whose handmade dinnerware goes out to Michelin-starred restaurants from his studio in Union City.

The series also tells an unvarnished truth — even the most esteemed restaurants can lose their footing.

Some of Madia’s other Chicago restaurants, like Blackbird and Café Cancale, became one of the many across the country to close because of the COVID-19 pandemic. That reality is incorporated into the show’s second-season storyline as Sydney stares at the deflating headlines, then realizes a restaurant she just visited has gone under, too.

She tries to hire chefs for The Bear, but with employees hard to come by since COVID, she fears no one will answer her ads. So she resorts to chatting up employees outside a restaurant. When a chef sees her moving in for the poach, he tells her off. She can’t help but agree with him.

“It was always hard to open a restaurant and keep a restaurant open,” Calo says. “Obviously, it’s harder now. But we were really excited to find a way to tell these stories in a way that didn’t feel like a documentary or a lesson. It’s a funny moment for Sydney.”

Out of the kitchen, into the world

Carmy and Sydney know that a whipping up a shining new restaurant means tasting the outside world.

Allowing staff to leave the kitchen, like Sydney did, can reset and expand a palate. This also gives them time to reflect, take stock, get inspired and shake up their routine — which is also how some people reacted to the pandemic and quarantine.

“Our inspiration for the emotional arcs of the season was about what happens to these people when they don’t have the intense structure that they’ve gotten so used to,” Calo says. “How does that bring you joy? How does that bring you peace? How does that bring you more anxiety?”

In the fourth episode, “Honeydew,” directed by Rutherford’s Ramy Youssef, the Golden Globe-winning co-creator and star of Hulu’s New Jersey-set series “Ramy,” (Storer was an executive producer and director), Sydney and Carmy send Marcus (Lionel Boyce) to Copenhagen. He reports to Noma — a restaurant where Carmy used to work that has three Michelin stars — for a full pastry chef immersion with Chef Luca (Will Poulter).

Richie finds purpose in another installment as he learns the value of listening — and paying attention to the smallest details — at a top-flight restaurant headed by Chef Terry (Oscar winner Olivia Colman). Longtime Original Beef chefs Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) and Ebraheim, aka “Ebra” (Edwin Lee Gibson) both step outside their comfort zones, too, as they become culinary school students.

Even Carmy starts to open up.

This brooding chef, who seems to carry a boulder on his shoulders just existing, is eternally looking for the other shoe to drop — there is “always another shoe,” he says. At an Al-Anon meeting, he admits “fun” is absent from his grueling vocation.

The realization arrives after a conversation with Richie, who assumes the chef must enjoy his dream job.

“That idea came from a conversation Chris and I had just as friends being like, ‘When’s the last time we had fun as adults in this weird time, post-pandemic?’” Calo says. “What is fun as you get older? And is that something that’s even possible?”

“The Bear” is streaming on Hulu.

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.