SUR Restaurant & Lounge

Dining ironically is one of life's great pleasures. Mapping out your 17-mile drive to the nearest Red Lobster to pummel Cheddar Bay Biscuits into your mouth, or throwing back Fireball shots and flying off the mechanical bull at Saddle Ranch are experiences we all need from time to time. But for these types of restaurants to work, there has to be a kernel of genuine joy somewhere deep down, something to look forward to beyond the cringiness.

SUR—a gaudy, TV-famous restaurant that should be the epitome of ironic dining—offers nothing of the sort.

If you feel like you’ve heard of this place but aren’t sure why, it’s the restaurant everybody works at on Vanderpump Rules, the mindless reality show that pops up every year on Bravo. To be clear, Vanderpump Rules is a fun show, and creating television about your restaurant is smart business in this town. Have your cake and eat it too, Lisa. What we hold against SUR, however, is the fact that everyone who works here assumes that, because it’s the set of a TV show, it’s exempt from being a functioning restaurant. Guess what? It’s not.

photo credit: Philip Guerette

Simply by walking into this place, you start to feel duped. There’s a significant chance your reservation was lost the second you made it, and now your table has been usurped by an influencer whose sole IMDB credit is an episode of Married To Medicine. On our most recent visit, we drank from filled water glasses set out on our table, only to be informed moments later by an unbothered server that they were left behind from the previous table. The massive, overdecorated interior is essentially what it looks like on TV, but unless you’re hopped up on Benadryl after putting your kids to bed, the charm of cheap drapery and pink accent lighting disappears quickly. It gets worse: The food is tasteless and served exclusively at room temperature, the $65 bottle of salmon-colored cough syrup they're selling as “Vanderpump Rosé” is undrinkable, and you'll struggle to spot any of your favorites from the show (spoiler: they aren’t there). And even if they were, it’d be ridiculous to expect them to be as animated or engaged in person as the manufactured chaos on TV makes them out to be. And that’s precisely what’s wrong with SUR—everybody eating here is looking for an experience that doesn’t exist.

Take a look around instead. There'll be a few catatonic employees staring off into space, some lost tourists searching for Mario Lopez, and 23-year-olds making TikToks for no one. That’s it. Nobody here is in on the joke because there’s no joke being told. SUR truly believes it's one of LA's great restaurants, and that's not ironic, it’s just delusional.