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The Real Housewives of New York City Recap: Caviar Dreams

Season 14 Episode 2 Editor’s Rating3 stars ***

Photo: Bravo/Sean Zanni/Bravo I have a little chicken-or-the-egg dilemma, but it’s about Housewives and overpacking. Is Sai drastically overpacking for a weekend in Erin’s greige contemporary Hamptonss home because she’s now a Housewife, or do they cast Housewives who will always be overpackers? Historically, we haven’t had a single trip when any group of ladies left their home city where they weren’t so encumbered by luggage that they didn’t look like that boat that got stuck in the Suez Canal. Here we are, with a whole new crew, in a whole new era, and they’re still doing the same bullshit as their predecessors. We sent Luann to the glue factory for this?

Sai packs eight gigantic garment bags full of outfits for a three-day weekend “out East.” She says it’s because she is going to be doing Instagram shoots for the next six months of her content. Let’s just do the math on this, okay? Let’s say there were ten outfits in each bag; that’s 80 lewks. They’re going to spend most of their time sitting around the house, going to dinner, and doing a little bit of exercise. If each day consists of a morning look, exercise gear, a day ensemble, and an evening dress, that’s still only four outfits a day over three days; that’s 12 total outfits. That means she has 68 extra looks. She would have to wear about 23 extra outfits a day to wear everything she packed. That works out to about one outfit every 42 minutes for the 16 hours they’re awake. There is barely enough time to put each one on, photograph it, and then move to the next. And that is if all you did for 16 hours was shoot outfits. [NOTE TO MY EDITOR: My fee for this recap just went up because I had to do math.]

I’m not saying I’m against overpacking. (Well, I am for my life, but not for Housewives’ lives.) However, I feel like this has hit a point where it is performative. I get that Sai wants to “work” on vacation, and I get that she needs options, but couldn’t she have done this with six bags? Maybe four? There hits a certain point where the overpacking becomes performative, where it becomes about more than the clothes but rather the attention they’re getting by showing up with more gear than is necessary to climb Everest. And, I hate to say it, but so far I haven’t seen Sai wearing anything chic enough to warrant spending all of this attention on her damn clothes.

All that said, I actually enjoyed this episode a bit more than last week’s. From the beginning of the season, I really wanted the women to get to know each other a bit before they went right in with the petty fights about cheese and Catch. Here they are all just kind of chilling, spending time with each other, sharing things about their lives, and stocking up on some bad behavior to brandish in each other’s faces during some vague future like all Real Housewives should. Just ask Margaret Josephs; we need to be building arsenals here, people.

Jenna is the first one to Erin’s house because she drove from her own Hamptons bungalow in her vintage Mercedes because everything that Jenna Lyons touches turns to chic. I want that car, I want that house, I want her jeans, I want her glasses, I want everything. If I could just turn myself into a Jenna Lyons paper doll, I would be happy. When she arrives at Erin’s, she asks what perks she gets for being there before everyone else. Erin just gives her a little snack. She couldn’t have given her the best room? That is the ultimate Housewives perk right there.

Jessel, Ubah, Sai, and all of Sai’s luggage are in the car together — Brynn isn’t feeling well and will miss the first day — and they’re already complaining about Erin’s house. Sai brought her own roll of toilet paper because she needs to ensure she has two-ply at all times. Outside of Starbucks, train-station bathrooms, and whatever corporate hellscape you are forced to doo-doo in at work, where do you even see one-ply? Do they even make that? It’s like leaded gas. Why is Sai worried? That said, toilet paper is an excellent hostess gift. At least you know it’s something that will definitely get used and will never go to waste.

The ladies are calling ahead because they’re hungry, and Erin, who suffered the most during the Great Cheese-a-brouhaha of 2023, finally has a snack that she thinks they’ll get onboard with: caviar. In fact, she has two caviar caterers show up and put the precious eggs on some blinis, some potato chips, and the saddest-looking crudités I have ever seen outside of a D’Agostino’s. Seriously, did you really need to pay two people just so they could make two measly little trays of this?

Yes, caviar is a good snack, but it can’t be the snack. At least put out the rest of the Pringles, maybe some nuts, maybe some olives, maybe a charcoochie board? Oh wait, that will have cheese on it, so nix the charcoochie board and just go with appertivo snacks. (This recommendation has been brought to you by my bougie-ass husband and his Italian vacations.)

Ubah apparently did not pack any of her patented bananas and only wants to go to Provisions to get a sandwich when she finds out that Erin is not properly feeding them. This fight continues once all the ladies arrive, and Ubah goes off to Provisions, the superyacht of sandwich places, only to discover that it is closed. I was a little excited when she got shut out, I’m not going to lie, but I didn’t understand the whole journey. Did Erin offer to make anyone anything other than caviar? When they all showed up starving, couldn’t she at least been like, “I have a box of mac and cheese.” I mean, she couldn’t whip up a yogurt and granola? She couldn’t scramble an egg? There had to be some provisions in her Provisions-less house. Also, couldn’t Ubah have couched it like, “Oh, thanks for the caviar, but they have my favorite sandwich, which I’ve been dreaming of for weeks.” Everyone in this house could have been less rude by a factor of three.

While the ladies are sitting around with their caviar, we do get a great discussion about Jenna and her mother, who died about six weeks prior and they weren’t close at all. Jenna says her mother was diagnosed late in life with Asperger’s syndrome and was often cold, aloof, and distant, qualities the rest of the women see in Jenna. We also learn that Jessel hasn’t fucked her husband since her kids were born, and our mouths all fell on the floor, and the one Pringle with three caviar eggs we were all allocated comes tumbling out to leave a little itty-bitty mess on Erin’s gray rug. As if to make up for it, Jenna gives all of the women a set of lingerie for their little sleepover.

For dinner, they all go to Erin’s favorite restaurant, Topping Rose, because, of course, Real Life Rachel only wants to go to the most basic restaurant in all of the Hamptons. (P.S. Tinsley did it first.) When they arrive, she says to the women, “Welcome to Topping,” as if they are a bunch of twinks who just had a shared 31st birthday party.

The dinner conversation is lively. We hear from Jenna about how she discovered she was a lesbian later in life, how she came out thanks to the New York Post, and how having sex with women is so much better than having sex with men. To be honest, it made me want to give it another whirl. However, it would be with none of the women around this table because they had no idea who American hero, lesbian legend, and all-around GOAT Billie Jean King is! What are they even teaching in school these days? How to stitch on TikTok?

Though I am not so excited about Jenna keeping her girlfriend private, I get it. I totally do. This is the right decision from a humanist point of view. However, the Housewife job description is that you have to show us all of your life. Even if Jenna doesn’t talk about this woman on the show, how soon before her friends at the Post are digging her up, doxing her, and shoving her in front of a deluge of Deux Moi sightings? She will be out there regardless; maybe just give her a chance to tell her story onscreen?

We also got to learn more about Jessel and her henpecked husband, Pavit. She tells us that they were friends and roommates, and it took a visit from her mother to tell her that P was absolutely in love with her and now they’re married. Ah, that’s so sweet. But listen to Sai, sister: If your sex life or finances are messed up, so is your relationship. She needs to get on that disco stick post-haste.

Under the Eileen Davidson Accords, we’re supposed to give each Housewife a five-episode grace period before judging her. However, that has been hard since there is a whole cast of newbies. I’m not making rulings this early into the season, but I will say that I find Ubah difficult to watch, much like her cousin Chanel Ayan. I don’t even care about the Provisions thing, but everything else about her is too much, too showy. When she sits down at dinner, she gets out her compass to make sure she’s pointing north. When they go to use the bathroom and walk by the kitchen, she goes in to talk to the staff, who have absolutely no interest in entertaining her. Then, she takes a can of coconut milk back to the table for some reason, and all the ladies pass it around before giving it to the waitress to return to its rightful home. Is she doing this for the camera? If so, she needs to stop. Is this just who she is? Even if it is, well, she also needs to stop.

When they return to Erin’s, and everyone tries on their lingerie, I don’t mind Ubah that much. She’s strutting around, showing off her silky slip, and having a good time. I don’t mind when she’s too much around the women, but when she drags onlookers into her attention tsunami, my testicles are vacuumed up into my torso.

Back at the house, it is Jessel who is embarrassing herself. Her lingerie look is a long, ill-fitting, green sheath, and she’s marching around complaining about her gift, how ugly it is, how big it is, and how garish the color. She says, right to Jenna’s face, “It’s fucking disgusting.” Way to modulate your response in front of the woman it came from! I don’t think it’s that bad, but it does fit horribly. With the right sizing, I think Jessel would look dope. But there’s something weird going on with the lingerie. Jenna mentions that she talked to a friend, possibly the owner of the brand, and the friend knew Sai and some other “influencers” would be there. Several women mention Jenna looking at their Instagrams to see what they would like and then are upset she came up with these selections.

This matters because, though it is not entirely explained, it seems like these were a freebie to Jenna either from the label or from a PR friend who reps the label and has access to free garments. That, to me, explains why they might not have been the best choices or in the right sizes. It was like Jenna’s friend said, “Here’s a bunch of free lingerie,” and Jenna just had to figure out whom to give it to. Regardless, Jessel is someone who had to be told that she can’t have Alexander Wang’s logo across her back and a Balenciaga logo on her bag. This is the kind of person we’re taking fashion advice from now? I guess maybe she’d have some better things to wear if she just packed more.

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