Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
In 1998, a salt-and-pepper-haired occasional actor named Guillermo Zapata opened the restaurant SUR on a quiet block of Robertson Boulevard in West Hollywood. Serving dishes from Zapata’s home country of Argentina, it was initially a modest spot—a spare white room with fewer than a dozen tables. But in 2005, looking to expand the restaurant, Zapata teamed up with the restaurateurs Lisa Vanderpump and Ken Todd, a married couple who had relocated from London to Los Angeles. Todd was a self-made businessman with a stiff corona of beige curls, and Vanderpump was a high-cheekboned beauty and onetime actress who, in the mid-eighties, starred in two music videos for the New Romantic pop group ABC. The couple had owned more than twenty restaurants, bars, and clubs throughout the years. But SUR, which they transformed into a cavernous, vaguely Moorish-themed lounge, was their crown jewel. People would journey to L.A. just to dine there.
As is often the case these days, the business owed its success to reality television. In 2010, Vanderpump was cast on the Bravo reality show “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” where her plummy British accent and sharp humor made her something of a queen bee. (SUR, in addition to Villa Blanca, a “Mediterranean inspired” restaurant in Beverly Hills that Vanderpump opened with Todd in 2009, was sometimes featured on the show.) Fortunately for viewers, Vanderpump’s hauteur didn’t stop her from sparring with her fellow-castmates, who, in the manner of the popular Bravo franchise, were rich middle-aged ladies with a distinct taste for drama. All of this was a tad undignified, but in 2013 Vanderpump got a chance to present herself in a more respectable light, when she parlayed her renown on “Housewives” into a spinoff reality show, “Vanderpump Rules.”
This was SUR’s big break. Though Vanderpump appeared on the program, and served as an executive producer, the show’s main focus was the restaurant and its employees: a group of lusty, hard-partying young protagonists whom Vanderpump, as a kindly but firm boss, was prepared to both chide and guide. In the early days of the series, Vanderpump was fond of saying, “Villa Blanca is where you take your wife, SUR is where you take your mistress.” SUR—an acronym whose letters, in an astonishing twist, stood for Sexy Unique Restaurant—was meant to be a bit louche. With its crystal chandeliers, mirror-tiled bar, and pink lighting, the restaurant was a ready-made set for fun and mess. The servers and bartenders, almost all of them twentysomethings moonlighting there while attempting to make it in Hollywood, were also, crucially, more than willing to live and love, fuck and fight, as the cameras rolled.
There was Jax Taylor, a hunky model turned bartender, who was dating the waitress Stassi Schroeder, although he had secretly cheated on Schroeder with her chaotic best friend, Kristen Doute, an actress-waitress, who also happened to be dating his best friend, the shifty-eyed bartender Tom Sandoval. There was Sandoval’s and Jax’s other B.F.F., Tom Schwartz, a people-pleasing model with commitment issues, who was dating Katie Maloney, a server with a taste for tequila, who was also a close friend of Schroeder’s and Doute’s. All three women were frenemies of Scheana Shay, a waitress with pop-star dreams, whose own best friend, Ariana Madix, a bartender and an aspiring performer, began dating Sandoval after his split from Doute, who then, for her part, began dating James Kennedy, a cheeky British busboy-d.j., who’d also hooked up with Lala Kent, a diva-ish hostess who had previously had a thing with Jax. (More than anyone else on the show, Jax has embraced a mononymous identity.) Jax, meanwhile, after splitting with Schroeder, ended up dating Brittany Cartwright, a Kentucky-born waitress, before cheating on her with Faith Stowers, another server.
What a clusterfuck! These cast members—conventionally attractive, often intoxicated—seemed as if they were created in a lab for the express purpose of appearing on reality television. And yet there was something lived-in and real about all of it. The cast’s dynamics weren’t formed in the mind of a producer but, rather, over years of incestuous, pre-notoriety canoodling at SUR, a restaurant that felt almost like a college campus, albeit one without books. Here was a closed universe that you could follow avidly, pick favorites from, puzzle out, and, perhaps most significantly, believe in. I started watching during the first season, and I couldn’t get enough; neither, apparently, could many others. By its third season, an average of 1.5 to two million people tuned in each week, and it has consistently been among Bravo’s top shows. Events that took place onscreen have embedded themselves in my memory, as distinct and striking as if they had happened in my own life: Schroeder slapping Doute after finding out, on camera, that Doute had slept with Jax; or Cartwright telling Jax, in her thick Southern accent, to “rawt in hell,” upon discovering his indiscretion with Stowers; or Jax shedding his chunky cable-knit cardigan to brawl, bare-chested, with a bartender named Frank in a parking lot in Las Vegas.
Though the people featured on “Vanderpump Rules” claimed to have a variety of entertainment-oriented career aspirations, they seemed quite content to be locked in a kind of forever present: waiting tables, mixing drinks, partying, beefing, and copulating with the same small circle of people in and around SUR. The show was a highs-and-lows-filled soap opera, but it also felt like a reality-TV version of a workplace sitcom not unlike, say, “Cheers,” though with a much heftier dose of sex and drunkenness. I found this oddly soothing—an antidote to the hustle culture and growth-oriented gospel of twenty-tens America. The “Vanderpump” cast was enjoying a quasi-communal, “Groundhog Day”-style life that could be born only of letting go of worldly ambition. It was perhaps as close as West Hollywood could get to the ethos of the kibbutz. “I want to grow old with the vanderpump gang,” I tweeted in 2017, envisioning myself in a retirement home, still watching the SUR crew toddling around the restaurant with drinks in hand, perhaps with the assistance of walkers. (Sunrise, sunset.)
Over the years, the “Vanderpump” universe would narrow and expand. During the nationwide racial reckoning in the summer of 2020, Stassi Schroeder and Kristen Doute were fired after Faith Stowers, who is Black, revealed that they had been racist toward her. Jax Taylor and Brittany Cartwright, who married on the show in 2019, were also let go amid the reshuffling. Earlier this year, Doute, Cartwright, and Jax returned to the Bravo fold as part of a “Vanderpump” spinoff called “The Valley,” which documents their somehow-still-drama-filled life a stone’s throw away from the streets of West Hollywood, in the more suburban, family-friendly San Fernando Valley. Many of the current and former “Vanderpump” castmates have become full-on reality-TV celebrities, with the attendant social-media sponsorships and side careers: Scheana Shay, who married and had a child with a burly trainer from New Zealand named Brock Davies, has shilled for the weight-loss aid Hydroxycut and released a couple of dance singles. Lala Kent, who has also had a child, released a line of cruelty-free beauty products under the name Give Them Lala, and attended, with Vanderpump and Ariana Madix, the 2023 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. James Kennedy has d.j.’d in clubs from Las Vegas to Miami Beach and, like many of his castmates, offers his services on the celebrity-video-message site Cameo.
The expansion of the “Vanderpump” universe has necessarily included the launch of more “Vanderpump”-adjacent restaurants. In 2014, on the heels of SUR’s newfound relevance, Vanderpump and Todd opened Pump, a gay-friendly restaurant and bar (“Where you take your boyfriend”) on the corner of Robertson and Santa Monica Boulevards. In 2018, they followed up with Tom Tom, a restaurant and lounge named after Schwartz and Sandoval and situated a few shopfronts down from Pump. In late 2022, the two Toms ventured out on their own and opened Schwartz & Sandy’s, a bar and restaurant in L.A.’s Franklin Village neighborhood. The following year, Jax opened a sports bar called Jax’s, in Studio City. Vanderpump also has three restaurants outside L.A.: Vanderpump à Paris and Vanderpump Cocktail Garden, both in Las Vegas, and Wolf by Vanderpump, in Lake Tahoe.
The planning and opening of these spaces have provided tension-filled plot points for the show. (In 2016, Schwartz wed Katie Maloney. Would the difficult process of building out Schwartz & Sandy’s hasten their marriage’s demise? Yes.) But the restaurants were also a way to extend the universe of the show into the so-called real world. This made business sense, of course—a captive TV audience translated into paying diners—but it also allowed the show’s fans to experience IRL what they had been following from season to season. It was, essentially, reality reality television. “The Kardashians,” another long-running series, had managed to keep viewers locked into an organic macrocosm by relying on the most organic and lasting structure of all: the family. “Vanderpump Rules” had no such enduring structure, and so it created it. Ingeniously, it was one that viewers could enter.
In late May, I hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream and my dying iPhone. After picking up a rental Hyundai Sonata, I drove straight to Something About Her, in West Hollywood, the newest dining establishment in the “Vanderpump” universe. SAH, as it’s sometimes acronymized, perhaps in a nod to SUR, was dreamed up by Madix and Maloney. In the tenth season of “Vanderpump,” Madix and Sandoval, who had been dating and cohabiting for nearly a decade, split up acrimoniously after he cheated on her with her friend, a newer, fawnlike cast member named Rachel (Raquel) Leviss. This scandal, which came to be known as Scandoval, earned the series its highest ratings yet: a stunning 5.9 million viewers watched Part 1 of the season’s reunion, making it the most watched Bravo episode in the network’s history. Scandoval also raised the fortunes of the scorned Madix, who, in the wake of her heartbreak, ascended to the role of America’s sweetheart almost as quickly as Sandoval’s public reputation sank. (In the months after the scandal broke, Madix competed on “Dancing with the Stars,” played Roxie Hart in “Chicago,” on Broadway, and created sponsored content for a dozen brands.) Madix and Maloney had been envisioning Something About Her, a pocket-size sandwich shop with a yellow-and-white-striped awning, as a rom-com-themed “unapologetically feminine” space even before Sandoval’s betrayal. But, in the wake of the scandal, the spot’s identity as a girl-power avatar was sealed, way before it had even served a single chive-infused goat-cheese sammie named after Drew Barrymore.
SAH was set to have its grand opening the following day, but I’d seen TikToks and Instagram posts indicating that Bravo personalities were already stopping by the spot. Andy Cohen, the executive producer of “The Real Housewives” and the host of the talk show “Watch What Happens Live,” had picked up a chicken-salad sandwich; Lindsay Hubbard, a cast member from “Summer House,” a reality series about New Yorkers partying in a Hamptons share, had dropped by to show her support. But when I arrived, in the early afternoon, the shop was closed, so I wandered down and then back up the street, which was home to a host of other “Vanderpump” restaurants. SUR and Tom Tom—both nighttime spots—were still shuttered. (Pump, which had let its lease expire in 2023, after ten years in business, was now a boarded-up construction site.) The weather was clement, and on Santa Monica Boulevard a sharp smell of beer hung over a cluster of not-yet-open gay bars (two of which, I was told, are owned by Lance Bass, a former member of the band ’NSync; a friend of Vanderpump’s, Bass had officiated Jax and Cartwright’s wedding ceremony on the show). A round-eyed food-delivery robot with an orange tail and ears scooted silently past—a promotional tie-in for the new “Garfield” movie, which was premièring that weekend. I headed to my car, a little disappointed, when out of the corner of my eye, across the street, I suddenly saw Maloney, who must have just exited the sandwich shop, walking toward her car, too, wearing a floral summer dress and carrying a small silver bag, her bobbed brunette hair tucked neatly behind her ears. Elated, I fumbled for my phone and took a blurry picture. My journey had begun.
That night, I headed to Schwartz & Sandy’s. I had heard that, since Season 11 of “Vanderpump” had begun airing, the restaurant had been holding live viewing parties. When I arrived, the place was packed for the weekly event. Schwartz & Sandy’s is in an unremarkable strip mall next to a pet store, across the street from the Scientology Celebrity Centre. Inside, its décor suggests a combination of about seventeen distinct design argots: Tropicália, cozy tchotchke chalet, carhop neon. Schwartz, wearing George McFly-style glasses and a T-shirt printed with the word “pasta” in the style of the Prada logo, was lining up shots at the bar and amiably shooting the shit with fans. (“He was so cool. We talked about homelessness!” a judge from Buffalo who was visiting L.A. for a drug-court conference told me.)
At eight o’clock sharp, Schwartz cut the music and turned up the volume on a mounted screen that was airing Part 2 of the show’s Season 11 reunion. (A signature component of almost every Bravo show, the reunion often consists of at least two episodes in which cast members hash out the events of the past season with the help of Cohen.) As the discussion onscreen heated up, the crowd whooped, and then kept whooping, especially when the action that was discussed among the cast members had anything to do with Schwartz, who was, after all, right there, grinning and blushing behind the bar. Shay mentioning that she and Schwartz had made out in Vegas many seasons ago? Whoop! Maloney talking about hooking up with Max Boyens, a curly-haired Schwartz & Sandy’s bartender who was, in fact, serving drinks there that very night, as the reunion was airing? Extra-loud whoops, along with some shrieks and claps. It was “Simulacra and Simulation” meets Schwartz & Sandy’s.
During the commercial breaks, a friend of the Toms named Kyle Chan, a jeweller who has occasionally been featured on the show (he designed Maloney’s and Cartwright’s engagement rings), got on a mike, pumping up the crowd and handing out small gifts of earrings and bracelets to the patrons who had travelled from out of the country to be there. The last and only time I had been at Schwartz & Sandy’s was a year before, mere days after Scandoval broke, when the place hummed with an energy of incipient revenge. (On the night I dined there, a customer had scrawled the words “Fuck Tom, team Ariana” on a mirror in lipstick, an incident that was later referenced on the show.) Now, however, a spirit of mellow, good-natured fellowship seemed to pervade the place. (Perhaps it was because Sandoval, the more problematic of the Toms, wasn’t in the house.) In the bathroom, as I was waiting to enter a stall, a woman exiting stuffed a bunch of paper towels in my hand, unasked, after informing me that the toilet paper had run out. She was a total stranger, yet I felt like I’d known her my whole life. After all, we both loved “Vanderpump Rules.” We were one.
Early the next afternoon, I arrived, once again, at Something About Her. It was opening day, and I was hoping to try a sandwich or two. But a line, many dozens of people long, now snaked out of the store, and I could catch only a glimpse of Madix and Maloney inside serving customers. Some guests toward the front of the line said that they had been waiting for three hours. Remarkably, the crowd—mostly youngish women, with only a smattering of men—seemed in high spirits, though this good will appeared not to extend to either Tom Sandoval or Tom Schwartz or to their establishment, where, I felt a little shy to admit to prospective SAH patrons, I had been whooping it up the night before. As I chatted with customers, the Schwartz & Sandy’s and Something About Her divide emerged as a bit of an East Coast–West Coast-style feud. Bella and Sarah, two friends in their late twenties, told me they felt that Madix and Maloney had been treated shabbily by their former mates, and that they wanted to be there for them. “This is, like, a feminist thing,” Sarah told me. “I’m here to support the girls,” Bella said. Christina, a woman in her late forties who explained that she is often in the area because her Sunday-morning A.A. meeting is held across the street, was disappointed that other cast members hadn’t been more supportive of Madix and Maloney’s venture. (On the first part of the reunion that had aired the week before, Lala Kent had snarkily referred to the restaurant as “Nothing About Her.”) “This could have been about women supporting women,” Christina said. A young man named Evan, who was wearing a gray Something About Her sweatshirt, had shared a calendar alert for SAH’s opening day with his friend Kareem. “This feels like a big moment,” he said. “We want the business to succeed.” Like Christina, the two were incensed by a dynamic that they had noticed throughout the season, in which the other cast members were pushing Madix to get over Sandoval’s betrayal. “It wasn’t a mistake—it was a choice,” Kareem said, of Sandoval’s infidelity. Evan added, “There was no humility or remorse . . . which made me want to support this endeavor even more.”
Some of the people in line had come to Something About Her from far away. In the course of several minutes, I met Laura from Scotland, Gee from New York, and Micaela from Atlanta, who was waiting with a rolling suitcase, en route to LAX. Most seemed not to have perused the menu in advance. In truth, the food was a little beside the point, as it often is in “Vanderpump” establishments. An hour after I first saw Laura in line, I spotted her as she emerged from the shop. She was carrying a couple of sandwiches in a paper bag, but what she offered up triumphantly was her phone. “I FaceTimed with my daughter back in Scotland with Katie and Ariana,” she said, showing me a selfie, in which she stood, beaming, cheek to cheek with a smiling Maloney and Madix. “They were lovely. It was a thrill! I couldn’t believe it!”
Sandwich-less, I decided to drive over with a friend to Third Street, in the nearby Beverly Grove neighborhood. This was another “Vanderpump”-coded area: the home to Vanderpump and Todd’s pet shop and dog rescue, Vanderpump Dogs, just across the street from Kyle Chan’s jewelry store. As we drove, my friend, a “Vanderpump” buff, pointed out a bridal shop in which Cartwright had tried on wedding dresses in Season 8. At Vanderpump Dogs, I surveyed the products, which included not only items for pets (studded collars, soft chew toys in the shape of Vanderpump Vodka bottles) but also gifts for their owners (T-shirts emblazoned with sentiments like “I’m crazy about dogs, just not crazy about bitches”). The walls were decorated with pictures of Vanderpump and Todd with their dogs, including Giggy, their beloved, alopecia-suffering Pomeranian, who had died in 2020. (I recalled how, while dining at Pump in the mid-aughts, I had spotted a suit-wearing Ken Todd carrying Giggy, who himself was wearing a tiny suit.) Among the yipping pups up for adoption was one named Jax Vanderpump, a sandy-furred Maltese mix rescued from a high-kill shelter who, his tacked-up bio read, loved people and dogs alike.
It struck me that there was something old-timey about these “Vanderpump” enclaves. Walking on Third Street or on Robertson, I felt as if I were in a themed village, or maybe one of those blocks where only cobblers opened shop—the kinds of places where everybody knows your name, or, if not exactly your name, then at least that of the bit players you’ve parasocially watched on TV. I was reminded of this the following night, when I went to SUR to see James Kennedy, the d.j., work the decks. Kennedy, who has been a “Vanderpump” cast member since he was a busboy of twenty-one—he is now thirty-two—had struggled on the show with anger-management problems and alcohol addiction, often bursting into tears or tirades onscreen. He is also, perhaps, the quickest and funniest of the “Vanderpump” bunch, and as he played Top Forty hits to a heaving crowd of fans he kept up a jokey patter that referenced familiar “Vanderpump” figures.
After leading the crowd in a sing-along to the “Vanderpump Rules” theme song, he revealed that his girlfriend, a newish cast member named Ally Lewber, was in the house, and with his fist pumping the air he led the excited revellers in a chant (“Ally! Ally!”). Then he shifted to hectoring them into ordering Pumptinis, the signature Vanderpump drink, consisting of vodka, orange liqueur, and grapefruit juice. (Fist still up: “Pumptini! Pumptini!”) As a “Vanderpump” reunion episode from two seasons prior played on a TV above the bar, Kennedy continued to ad-lib. “A scrub is a worm with a mustache when he puts on scrubs!” he cracked into the mike while playing TLC’s “No Scrubs.” (He was quoting his own read of Sandoval, who at the height of the cheating scandal sported steampunk-esque facial hair.) Guillermo Zapata, the founder of the establishment, who is still at SUR after all these years, weaved through the crowd with his phone held aloft, live-streaming the event on Instagram.
After I downed two glasses of Vanderpump-brand rosé (passable, but, again, beside the point), it was time to hit my next destination: Jax’s Studio City. “The Valley”—the new “Vanderpump” spinoff, starring Jax, Cartwright, and Doute—has been a breakout hit for Bravo. Focussing on a group of conventionally attractive, sometimes intoxicated couples in their thirties and forties, the show is, naturally, a hotbed of pettiness, but it is also a surprisingly bracing watch, depicting, not unlike a modern-day Richard Yates novel, the emptiness, despair, and self-delusion at the heart of contemporary marriage. (Two “Valley” couples, among them Jax and Cartwright, have broken up since the show premièred.)
During its first season, “The Valley” followed Taylor and Cartwright as they worked, down to the wire, on opening Jax’s, situated on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley, on the so-called wrong side of the Hollywood Hills. This geographical shift’s slightly déclassé implications were reflected in an exchange between the couple on the show’s finale, which featured the bar’s launch. Jax: “We have a bar in Hollywood!” Cartwright: “We have a bar in the Valley.” Several of the items on the menu, no matter how unremarkable, seemed to be branded as proprietarily Jax’s (The Jax cocktail: a Tito’s on the rocks; the Jax burger: a burger). I went out on a limb and ordered Mamaw’s Beer Cheese, which, as “Vanderpump” lore has it, is a recipe of Cartwright’s grandmother, who is from Kentucky. (The Taylor-Cartwrights discussed their plan to brand and market the pimento-cheese-like delicacy all the way back in Season 7, though it hadn’t come to fruition.)
Jax’s was a strange cross between a “Vanderpump”-style establishment (chintzy wallpaper, pink neon signs depicting some of the show’s best-known catchphrases, “rawt in hell” among them) and a sports bar (picnic tables under an enormous outdoor tent, which, as a friend told me, a bit uncharitably, looks like the plant section of Home Depot). Huge flat-screens split the difference, airing ESPN and Bravo side by side, with football tackles and catfights vying for diners’ attention. While a group of people on a trivia night huddled in the bar’s small indoor space, its large outdoor section was echoingly empty. Oddly, too, the sound system was playing the Smiths, which lent the tent an atmospheric if somewhat gloomy quality. I didn’t mind. As I dipped a hot, crusty pretzel in Mamaw’s tangy orange concoction (not bad, actually), I swayed along to the music. “Take me out tonight / Take me anywhere / I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care,” Morrissey sang. “To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die.” On a Thursday in late May at 10 P.M., in a completely unpeopled bar in the Valley, this sentiment seemed an appropriate capstone to my tour. Here I was, doing it: I was growing old with the “Vanderpump” gang. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
