Lisa Vanderpump, the restaurateur who made television work for her dining rooms

Lisa Vanderpump

Photo: Toglenn / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 15, 1960 Dulwich
Occupation	Child Actor
Awards	Worthy of the City

Most reality stars sell their private lives to television. Lisa Vanderpump sold it her restaurants. The premise of the show that carries her name was never her own drama but the waiters, bartenders and hostesses at SUR, the West Hollywood restaurant she owns with her husband, Ken Todd, and her part in it was the one she plays in real life: the owner who appears at the table, settles the argument and leaves with a dog under her arm. The question it never answered is which business feeds which. Every season sent new customers to her dining rooms, and every new dining room gave the cameras another set.

She was born and raised in Dulwich, in south London, the daughter of an art director at an advertising agency. At nine she was enrolled at the Corona Academy drama school, and at thirteen she was already on a film set as an uncredited extra in A Touch of Class, playing the daughter of Glenda Jackson’s character. By nineteen she had a flat of her own in Fulham and, as she later put it, nothing to her name but “a good education and a kick in the arse.”

The acting career that followed was steady and small. Her first credited film role came in the British horror picture Killer’s Moon; she made more than a hundred commercials, turned up in ABC’s “Poison Arrow” video and later took guest parts in American series such as Baywatch Nights and a supporting role in the thriller Separate Lives. What it left her with was an ease in front of a camera worth more than any of the parts.

The work that defined her began in May 1982, when she was twenty-one, at Cork’s Wine Bar in Kensington, the first bar Ken Todd owned. They married that August. Over the following decades the couple owned more than thirty restaurants and bars in Britain and the United States before settling in Los Angeles. In 2005 they became co-owners of SUR Restaurant & Lounge in West Hollywood with Guillermo Zapata and Nathalie Pouille Zapata, and in 2009 they opened Villa Blanca. Her own line on the difference became part of the brand: “Villa Blanca’s where you take your wife, and SUR’s where you take your mistress.”

Television arrived when she was nearly fifty. Bravo cast her among the original wives of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in October 2010, and the English restaurateur with the rescued dogs and the dry one-liners became the show’s reference point. Then Bravo built a spin-off around her staff. Vanderpump Rules premiered in January 2013 with Vanderpump as a cast member and executive producer, and SUR turned into a set where the servers’ affairs and fights played out between shifts while the owner presided from a booth. PUMP, a second West Hollywood venue, opened in 2014, and in 2018 came TomTom, which she co-owns with two of her own cast members, Tom Sandoval and Tom Schwartz.

The arrangement had a cost, and the clearest bill arrived in 2019. A dog that her castmate Dorit Kemsley had adopted from Vanderpump’s rescue organization was passed on to another family against the terms of the adoption, the story reached the press, and the rest of the cast accused Vanderpump of leaking it. She denied it, took a polygraph test on camera, skipped the reunion and in June 2019 announced she was leaving after nine seasons. The episode, known to fans as Puppygate, exposed the weak point of her television career: her business is part of her storyline and her charity is part of her brand, so there is no neutral ground from which she can claim to be only a bystander. Four years later Tom Sandoval’s affair with a castmate, the scandal fans called Scandoval, sent ratings for Vanderpump Rules soaring and earned the series its first two Emmy nominations, neither of which it won. The scandal that revived the show also used up its cast: Bravo replaced everyone except Vanderpump, and the rebooted twelfth season, which began in December 2025, made it official that the show belongs to the owner, not the staff. The expansion story also tends to skip the closures of Villa Blanca in 2020 and PUMP in 2023.

After Beverly Hills she worked mostly as a producer. In 2021 she hosted Overserved with Lisa Vanderpump on E!, sat on the judging panel of Pooch Perfect on ABC and fronted Vanderpump Dogs on Peacock, set at the Los Angeles rescue center she opened in 2017 through the Vanderpump Dog Foundation. She also led a 2015 march in Los Angeles against the Yulin dog meat festival and produced the documentary The Road to Yulin and Beyond. In 2024 Hulu premiered Vanderpump Villa, in which she runs the staff of a European estate; the series has moved from France to Italy to England. Las Vegas, meanwhile, became her second city, starting with the Vanderpump Cocktail Garden at Caesars Palace in 2019.

The hotel is her largest bet so far. Working with Caesars Entertainment, she turned the former Cromwell on the Strip into The Vanderpump Hotel, a 188-room boutique property she designed with Nick Alain, her partner in the Vanderpump Alain design business. It held its grand opening on June 11, 2026, and earned AAA’s Four Diamond rating within its first three months. The cameras were there, of course. Vanderpump Rules: Lisa Las Vegas, a three-part series about the renovation and opening night, begins on Bravo on October 20, 2026, and runs over two nights, with appearances from Lala Kent and Tom Schwartz. A week earlier she published her first cookbook, Home at Villa Rosa: Cooking and Living the Vanderpump Way, named after her Los Angeles home.

She is also done with the franchise that introduced her. When Andy Cohen said in September that she had refused a cameo on The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip, she replied that she never said no herself and that the network must have declined for her while she was opening the hotel. A return to The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, she has said, is “never gonna happen.”

Vanderpump and Todd have been married for more than four decades and have a daughter, an adopted son and two grandsons. The fourth season of Vanderpump Villa is already being shot in Salzburg. The open question is the one her whole career has posed, and the hotel only makes it bigger: whether her newest property will be judged as a place to stay, or as a set waiting for its next season.

Tags: business, ceos, Reality television, Lisa Vanderpump, Vanderpump Rules, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills