When Lisa Vanderpump returned to our screens along with a slew of new SUR-vers for the Vanderpump Rules Season 12 premiere, the episode highlighted a sobering reality: Lisa candidly sat her SUR staff down to detail SUR’s financial issues, and make it crystal clear what’s now at stake.
“Restaurant costs are up. Many restaurants close down. Four in the last week have closed down,” Lisa bluntly said during a staff meeting in the Dec. 2 episode. “Nobody is surviving this s—t. This is survival of the fittest.”
It came after Lisa’s business partner, Nathalie Pouille Zapata, discovered surveillance video of SUR-vers Marcus Johnson and Jason Cohen sneaking drinks during a shift.
“It’s not respectful,” Nathalie told Lisa ahead of the staff meeting. “We’ve been struggling so much that, at least, you want to have the support of your staff.”
As Lisa explained during the episode, “West Hollywood was the center of the nightlife in Los Angeles. But since COVID, it never seemed to recover. SUR has survived, but it hasn’t been thriving.”
Although Lisa and her husband Ken Todd made the decision to close another of their iconic restaurants, Pump, during Season 11, Lisa was determined not to let the same thing happen to SUR.
“I already made the decision to say goodbye to one baby. I’m not gonna do it again,” she declared during a confessional interview.
Lisa also tried to reassure Nathalie, and told her, “S—t like this goes on, okay? We’re going to catch it, we’re going to deal with it, and this restaurant—I know it’s been a really hard few months for you. We have survived over the years. We’re going to survive now, okay?”
To her staff, Lisa added another warning: “If we are going to continue to survive, this is a business. It’s about being your best and your brightest.”
Lisa Vanderpump explains why her staff is so important at SUR
As Season 12 welcomes a new shift of SUR-vers and bartenders, Lisa emphasized that her staff is the key to SUR’s financial success.
“SUR has been in business for 20 years,” she explained during the Dec. 2 premiere. “One of the reasons we’ve lasted as long as we have is the high expectations for the food, and the ambiance. But without a vibrant staff, it wouldn’t be SUR.”
The show’s announcement in Nov. 2024 called the new cast “close knit SUR-vers who are as complicatedly involved with one another as their iconic predecessors.”
Vanderpump Rules executive producer Alex Baskin also weighed in on the announcement, saying, “What a thrill it is to build on the legacy of this series by doing it all over again. With profound appreciation for the original group and their iconic run, we can’t wait for the audience to see a dynamic new group of co-workers and friends make their way through life together.”
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Lisa teased the new season and new cast to TMZ in February, when she insisted it’s “not going to disappoint.”
She added to Us Weekly, “When you have a restaurant, especially in Hollywood, with a revolving door of beautiful people who are all kinds of normally rather large personalities because they come to Hollywood for a reason, it’s always complicated. I am sure it’s gonna be very different with these young minxes when they get to work, but we shall see. I got some very interesting characters for sure, but SUR has been around for a very long time, and as I say, it’s a show we could have shot 12 months of the year.”
Lisa Vanderpump reveals why a new group of SUR-vers was needed
Although Alex Baskin called the first 11 seasons of Vanderpump Rules “extraordinary,” he was frank about the reason for the cast shakeup during the season finale of his Bravo’s Hot Mic Podcast, which included a sit-down with Lisa. He explained the show “wasn’t grounded in what it originally had been” as the focus in later seasons had become more on the cast members’ personal and professional lives outside of SUR.
Original cast members who were on all 11 seasons included Tom Sandoval, Katie Maloney, and Scheana Shay. Some cast members moved on to The Valley, including Brittany Cartwright, Kristen Doute, Lala Kent and Tom Schwartz.
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Lisa shared she felt the Season 11 cast’s lives had just taken “a different direction.”
“I felt that we told the story, and we always said together that we didn’t want to go down on a sinking ship,” Lisa continued. “It just changed, and I think that I still have a great relationship with some of them. But the others, their attitude changed, and it wasn’t what we set out to be. So, I think it was time to move on.”
Don’t miss Tom Sandoval’s advice for the SUR and Vanderpump Rules newbies.
