After years of publicly clowning Buc-ee's, chef and The Bear star Matty Matheson has finally joined the beaver cult.
According to The Houston Chronicle, Matheson, who plays Neil Fak on the Emmy-winning series, took to his Instagram Stories this week with a photo of himself standing in front of a Buc-ee’s location and a surprisingly simple admission: “I talked sh*t but this place is kinda tight.”
For years, Matheson had positioned himself as the rare holdout in the face of Buc-ee’s mania. In past interviews and videos, he openly mocked the chain’s devoted following and questioned why anyone would get excited about a gas station with a mascot and a gift shop.
“I go to small independent gasoline machine stations where they have no merch,” Matheson previously said. “They just have a lot of broken toilets and a lot of savory fellows lying around.”
He was even more blunt when he tried to make sense of Buc-ee’s fandom. “Yeah, everyone loves it. And you’re like, ‘What do you love?’ You love sour kiss candies or you love gasoline or you love windshield wipers? Like, what the f*ck are you talking about?” he said.
Matheson’s Beaver Nugget-flavored conversion comes at a moment when Buc-ee’s is somehow bigger than ever. Earlier this month, Buc-ee’s opened its first location in Ohio and reportedly pulled in more than $1 million in sales on day one, making it the biggest grand opening in company history.
Hotels in the area were packed, fans camped out, and the opening looked less like a truck stop debut and more like the launch of a new sneaker collab.
Buc-ee’s has also been in the headlines for less flattering reasons. A Florida customer recently went viral after posting a TikTok meltdown over the chain’s new pay-at-the-pump policy, while one of the company’s older Texas locations in Port Lavaca is reportedly being converted into a 7-Eleven.
The chef-turned-actor has long been more closely associated with Wawa, another beloved convenience-store institution with its own fiercely loyal fan base.
