The Buccaneers Season 2 Premiere: Leighton Meester Makes Dramatic Entrance as [Spoiler]'s Mother
Leighton Meester may have traded in her Upper East Side pearls for The Buccaneers' English corsets, but the girl's gossiping days are far from over.
Season 2 of the Apple TV+ drama premiered on Wednesday, picking up right where we left off: Nan's wedding day. In case you need a refresher, Season 1 ended with Nan deciding to marry Theo and gaining the duchess title in order to protect both her sister Jinny and mother Patti, who've left their respective spouses. This all came at a personal cost to Nan: She had just professed her love to Guy, who is now M.I.A. after offering to protect Jinny in hideout. (Read finale recap.)
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As if that all weren't messy enough, the Season 2 premiere sees Patti's fiery sister, Nelle (played by Meester), showing up at the wedding uninvited to give viewers a game-changing piece of information: She is Nan's biological mother. (We learned Patti wasn't Nan's biological mother last season.) Nelle apparently had an affair with Patti's husband back when she was 18, and the sisters haven't spoken since. Nelle and Patti face off in a backroom during the wedding reception, with Patti admitting she blamed Nelle more than her own husband for the long-ago affair. But the two ultimately make up and head back to America together — leaving the philandering Tracy to fend for himself abroad.
Meanwhile, Nan is clueless to Nelle's real identity, though the two seem drawn to each other. Midway through her wedding festivities, Nan randomly confesses all her anxieties to Nelle. Only later, at the end of the episode, Nan asks Patti, 'How long ago did you fall out?' Patti tells the 19-year-old Nan that it's been 19 years since Patti last spoke with her sister. Nan already knows Patti isn't her birth mom, but she hasn't been made aware of her birth mom's identity. Now, a knowing look flashes across her face; the Duchess is seemingly piecing together that the family fallout might be related to the maternity mystery.
The episode ends with Nan strengthening her bond with her own faraway sister — whose disappearance has caused much speculation in the press — by making a mess of her own. Taking her mother-in-law's advice, Nan decides to use her first official event as Duchess of Tintagel as an opportunity to show the world how she intends to behave: Instead of arriving to the formal affair in a black dress, and standing off to the side behind her Duke husband, the rebellious American arrives in a scandalous red gown — stealing the spotlight and replacing her sister's story on the front-page news.
What'd you think of all the messiness already underway in Season 2? Grade the premiere episode in the poll below, then hit the comments with your thoughts!
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Eater
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A Beer-Riddled Dive Bar Food Crawl Through Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley
They say alcohol sales are in decline in this country. They say that Los Angeles is a diet-and-health-conscious city. But clearly, those people don't spend much time in the San Fernando Valley, where the great American dive bar is alive and well, and thriving on a random Thursday in May. As a dad of a certain age who grew up in Los Angeles and has lived in many of its parts, I have come to love the Valley. A longtime friend and now New York transplant once described going to the Valley as 'having New Jersey in your backyard.' Driving across its breadth, you pass a multitude of strip mall dive bars, some whose names have never graced the pages of this publication. But as Eater LA's degenerate correspondent, I have often craned my neck and wondered what was inside some of these worn-in watering holes. Still, I would divert and spend my night at my favorite Valley dive bar, Foxfire Room, where it's dark and just small enough, with the ideal mix of friendly-surly service. (It's also where they shot Magnolia.) But since it does not serve food regularly, I weaponized this story as an excuse to round up some friends and see what bubbles away in the fervid fryers and shadowy saloons of Sherman Oaks, Van Nuys, Burbank, and beyond. Instead of ordering just the classics like wings, fries, and quesadillas, we wanted to order some dive bar curio cuisine as well. Basically, we wanted to order some weird shit. The results were all over the place — some surprising and some not — but I am proud to say we found some true gems of the Valley dive bar scene. We started our adventures on a Sunday afternoon, watching the Nuggets-Thunder playoff basketball game at Pineapple Hill Saloon & Grill in a Sherman Oaks strip mall. In my drunken, blurry memory of my first visit, the saloon manifests as a swarthy dive bar. But it turns out that on this afternoon trip, to which I arrived sober, Pineapple Hill Saloon is a classy pub with lots of television screens, dark wood accents, and nice booths. There were even a couple of lovely older ladies sitting down to their usual Sunday brunch. 'A tuna quesadilla is weird,' I said to my friend Kevin as we scanned the menu, before he pointed out that it's no weirder than a tuna melt. The quesadilla arrived studded with diced jalapeños and a side of Tito's Tacos-esque thin, mild fresh tomato salsa. (It was perfectly fine, though decidedly less good than a tuna melt.) The hit of the day was a plate of chili-cheese Tater Tots, arranged like a molten mesa. 'How's the lobster bisque?' I asked our bartender. 'Don't order the lobster bisque,' he responded, so I ordered the Father's Stew — a beef stew whose menu description confusingly leads with green beans. It supposedly dates back to an old family recipe, and arrives loaded with big hunks of beef and potato. It is not named after the 2022 Mark Wahlberg movie, Father Stu. Chili-cheese tater tots at Pineapple Hill Saloon. Noah Galuten Flatbread from Pat's Cocktails in Valley Village. Noah Galuten As Eater LA's degenerate correspondent, I have often craned my neck and wondered what was inside some of these worn-in watering holes. The basketball game ended and we drove the 10 minutes east to Pat's Cocktails in Valley Village — a bizarre place that felt like a nice bar in a regional airport, with small electric pizza ovens plugged in behind the bar. To be honest, I'm not even entirely sure what the place's name is: The one-time Bar Rescue subject has been called Pat's Cocktails, Pat's Cocktail Lounge, and Pat's Off Laurel. Regardless, they were out of their 'keto pizza dough,' so we opted for the flatbread pizza and a light lager. As I ate the floppy, heavily topped flatbread, I wished we had tried the keto pizza instead. Wings and tacos at Pogo's. Ray Suen A couple of weeks later, the real Valley dive bar food crawl began. My 'research' was a Yelp map search, checking photos to see if the bar even served food. We began at Pogo's in Van Nuys, named after an old comic strip, which opened in 1968. It was only 4 p.m. (we planned to go to six bars that night, so we had to start early), and Pogo's was packed with regulars, and we were very much visitors in their bar. There were multiple televisions playing everything from golf to the WMBA finals (no, not the WNBA – the Women's Military Basketball Association). There are pool tables, walls lined with old branded beer signage, two customers still wearing Cal Trans vests, a table of three women with a bucket of White Claw; and assorted men, their muscle tissue half-gelatinous from booze, with three near-empty drink glasses and remnants of wing bones and carne asada fries in front of them. My friend accidentally took a picture with his flash on, and it was clear from several cold stares that a violation of the space had occurred. The chef ambled out, pulled himself a draft beer from behind the bar, and walked it back to the kitchen. Exterior of Pogo's. Noah Galuten We drank a pitcher of lightly sweet Pogo's Blonde, which the bartender said is custom-made for them by Budweiser. Pogo's menu is deep, and breakfast is served all day. I wanted to order a rash Can Omelet but instead asked for the specialty of the house: a trio of small and better-than-expected cabeza tacos and some surprisingly good garlic-Parmesan and classic Buffalo chicken wings. I'm just going to say it: I loved Pogo's immediately, and thought we might have already found the best dive bar in Los Angeles. We wanted to order more food, but decided to take the win and move on. 'How was my picture?' someone stopped us on the still-sunlit street, following us outside, probably to make sure we're just idiots versus something more shameful. We apologized again for the intrusion and made our way, but that question was another sign of a good dive bar: it's typically a place for people who don't want any record of having been there. Our next stop was Norwood Bar & Lounge in North Hills, a small dive with long booths, an eclectic mix of hand-painted art (think Goose Island beer fan art and Mexican folk art), and a vending machine stuffed with Takis, Tic-Tacs, Red Bull, and Pepcid AC. Like Pat's, this cocktail lounge had pizza ovens behind the bar. 'How's the shrimp po' boy?' I asked the bartender. 'Popular,' she responded flatly. Despite its popularity, the po'boy was a soggy, stodgy crime against fried shrimp. The bacon-wrapped, cream-cheese-stuffed fried jalapeños were better. We drank Modelo Especial (perhaps the official beer of Valley dive bars) instead of the Donkey Punch — 'a mix of three rums, fruit juices, and a SoCo (Southern Comfort) float' limited to two per customer. I didn't order the Donkey Punch because I didn't want to die. Then we set off to the next location, but not before seeing a sign in the Norwood Shopping Center across the street advertising Tofu Spa Massage. 'Where did you guys go before this?' asked our server at Springbok Bar & Grill — admittedly not a dive bar, but rather, a classic South African rugby sports bar? Springbok Bar & Grill. Ray Suen 'Pogo's' I said, having already forgotten our previous stop, Norwood Bar & Lounge. 'If you came from Pogo's, then this must feel like the Ritz-Carlton,' she quipped. The table behind me gave us our second White Claw bucket sighting of the night. The server insisted that they always sell out of the peri-peri chicken livers and we should order them while we can. After another round of Modelo, the livers arrived on a dinner plate, nicely cooked and saucy, blanketed with fried onions and served with a dinner roll on the side. But the hit of the bar, and honestly perhaps the whole night, was the boerwors sausage — a South African beef-and-pork sausage that's made in-house, and pocked with more cloves than I have ever consumed in a single bite of food in my life. The sheer amount of clove is bracing at first but quickly grows on you. Sausages come sliced and nicely charred, alongside a sauce called 'train smash' — a thin tomato and onion gravy that tastes like Dutch colonialism. We left quite happy, and my friend Kevin dubbed it 'South African Chili's.' We headed west to Valley Glen, a sleepy neighborhood just west of North Hollywood, landing at Ireland's 32, a Valley institution since 1963, its name a reference to the number of counties in Ireland. This is the Irish pub that all other Irish pubs aspire to be — a genuine locals scene, far away from a college town, and packed with patrons of all stripes. There only seemed to be one bartender and another guy working in the back. To be honest, I don't know how they pulled it off, but our bartender was friendly and efficient, pouring drinks and taking food orders at the same time; every other person seemed to be waiting for the Blue Ramblers to take the stage. How did the cook in the back know who to run food to? I have no clue. The workers were deep in the weeds, but no one seemed to mind. Once the Ramblers took the stage, we saw women in their 20s dancing next to foot-tapping septuagenarians. We drank black-and-tans while waiting for our food, only feeling hurried because we wanted to see how many more bars we could hit before all of their kitchens closed. Fish and chips at Ireland's 32. Noah Galuten When the food did come, it was some of the best pub grub I've encountered in Los Angeles, highlighted by a dark, crisp, and airy batter that surrounded the deep-fried pickle spears as well as the cod on the fish-and-chips plate. Frankly, they were both lovely. The chips, which looked like the kind of overly browned and soggy potato wedges I typically hate, were even better, crisp and fluffy. I wanted to order one 'weird' thing, but my friends all shouted 'No' when I suggested the salmon and rice plate (too much of a '90s lunch plate for an Irish pub, maybe?). I opted instead for potato balls, a breaded sphere of bacon-and-cheese-filled mashed potatoes, deep-fried and covered in a creamy chipotle sauce. It was significantly more satisfying than it needed to be, and, in retrospect, may be the perfect fusion of Irish-Los Angeles bar food. We were stunned by how well the stop turned out, just before our delightful bartender covertly dropped four glasses of 'dessert' Bailey's-and-whiskey shooters, and thanked us for waiting. It was already nearly 10 p.m., and honestly a shame to have to leave. Did we walk down the street to Robin Hood British Pub and order Avocado Stuffed with Bay Shrimp? Yes, we did. It's basically a shrimp Louie on top of an avocado half. Look: if you're the kind of person who wants bay shrimp with Russian dressing on top of an avocado, I can't imagine you will be disappointed by what shows up. We ordered another round of lagers, too, but I felt far more full than buzzed at this point. Champs Sports Pub. Noah Galuten We next tried our luck at tiki bar legend the Tonga Hut, which I'm told serves solid tacos in the alley out back, but there wasn't time to stick out the hour-long wait to sit at the bar. So off we went to Burbank, sneaking in our orders at Champs Sports Pub before last call for food (which usually lands around 10:45 p.m.). This joint felt certainly more sports bar than dive bar, but the truth is that not many dive bars serve noteworthy food. Bloated on beer and fry oil, we dipped a soft pretzel into cheese sauce and a paper boat of chili. We ate run-of-the-mill mozzarella sticks and then found ourselves going back again and again for something Champs calls 'sidewinders' — picture spiral-cut state fair potato tornadoes, except if the machine was busted and kept chipping them off into small slices of fluffy, crisp, wide, seasoned fries. We gave one last cheers while rehashing the night's bar crawl. The consensus best bite of the night went to the cloven sausage from Springbok (though I cheated and voted for the multi-function beer batter at Ireland's 32). Best overall dive bar went to Pogo's. In the end, we discovered two absolute gems in the San Fernando Valley bar scene, and places we would return to in a heartbeat. Was my stomach ruined for about four days from, in all likelihood, a terrifying amount of fry oil? Absolutely. But it's a small price to pay for doing this all-important work. It is perhaps the closest thing I'll ever do to public service — giving back to the city that raised me.
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