Lisa Vanderpump blames high rent and will close her Pump restaurant in West Hollywood
After almost 10 years of operation, Lisa Vanderpump’s West Hollywood restaurant Pump will close this July.
“It’s with heavy hearts that we announce that the lease at Pump Restaurant is expiring and we will be closing its doors on July 5th after ten years of beautiful evenings under our olive trees,” the restaurant wrote this week in a statement posted on social media.
The “Vanderpump Rules” restaurant cited “untenable” rent increases brought on by its landlord as the reason for its closure, but promised to remain open throughout Pride Month in June for “one last hurrah.”
It’s a little after noon on Friday and Lisa Vanderpump is walking around the soon-to-be-finished garden patio of Pump, her new restaurant, bar and lounge in West Hollywood.
Since opening in 2014 at the corner of Robertson and Santa Monica boulevards, the restaurant, bar and lounge has been known less for its Mediterranean, Italian menu and more for its Instagramable aesthetics.
The restaurant features a garden area set with olive trees, decorated with ornate light fixtures. Before its opening, Vanderpump said she “wanted to create a garden that makes you feel like you’re in paradise, like France.”
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The restaurant was also widely known as a shooting location for the Bravo reality show “Vanderpump Rules,” a spinoff of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”
The show, which former “Housewives” star Vanderpump helped produce, features the restaurant’s staff. In recent months, the show has been rocked by revelations of a cheating scandal between two of the show’s stars, Tom Sandoval and Raquel Leviss.
Sandoval and Leviss both originally worked at Vanderpump’s other West Hollywood restaurant, Sur, which remains in operation. Sandoval went on to help open TomTom, another West Hollywood eatery, with Vanderpump and Tom Schwartz, also a star on the show.
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Vanderpump closed her Beverly Hills restaurant Villa Blanca in July 2020 amid the pandemic shutdowns.
When Villa Blanca closed , Vanderpump blamed the location’s landlord. As with much of the food service industry, the COVID-19 pandemic also played a factor in the restaurant’s closure.
“If the landlord had been willing to renegotiate and the lease wasn’t ending, we would have reopened, but unfortunately with coronavirus, the situation was beyond our control,” Vanderpump told the Daily Mail in 2020.
Vanderpump had been in negotiations with the landlord of the Pump property for a new 10-year lease before deciding to close due to the rent increases.
“While we have loved our time operating Pump, to take on another 10-year lease with a huge increase in rent by the landlords, is not something we are ready to commit to,” the Pump statement continued. “After successfully running 37+ establishments for many years, this type of rent is untenable.”
Vanderpump is making up for the closure, though. This week’s statement also announced that two other restaurants with Caesars Entertainment will open “in the coming year,” but did not specify where they would be located.
Representatives for Vanderpump and Caesars Entertainment did not immediately respond to The Times’ requests for comment.
A silver Ferrari veered into the eatery and came to rest in the front patio area facing the boulevard.
Times staff writer Jenn Harris contributed to this report.
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