The 'Vanderpump Rules' restaurant drama fuels me

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Viewers shocked by #Scandoval have flooded the Schwartz & Sandy Yelp page with comments. | Getty 

Welcome to Eater’s Weekend Special, an inside look at what our staff was buzzing about this week

If you are unfamiliar with the universe of Vanderpump Rules, I’m going to assume it’s because you spend your time doing learned things, like reading books in Latin and watching avant-garde ballet. But for the rest of us who can’t resist the trashy siren song of reality television, no scandal has been more intriguing — and all-consuming — this week than the #Scandoval.

Here’s a quick rundown: Vanderpump Rules premiered in 2013 as a spin-off of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Now in its 10th season, which is currently airing on Bravo, the show follows a group of drunken doofuses who work, party, and fight at multiple West Hollywood restaurants owned by RHOBH star Lisa Vanderpump, including SUR and Tom Tom. Now that the show’s been on for a decade, its cast members are stars in their own right, especially Tom Schwartz and Tom Sandoval, both of whom now own Tom Tom with Vanderpump, along with another bar called Schwartz & Sandy’s. 

Despite the chaos, finding the crux of the #Scandoval is deceptively easy. Just Google Schwartz & Sandy’s right now and look in the “related questions” field, where you’ll see the question at the heart of the issue: “What did Tom Sandoval do to Ariana?” The Ariana in question is Sandoval’s longtime girlfriend Ariana Madix, who allegedly caught Sandoval cheating when she found explicit videos of fellow cast member Raquel Leviss on Sandoval’s phone. From there, the situation escalated into breakups, alleged face-punching, legal threats, and a whole lot of drama, most of which has reportedly been captured by the Bravo cameras. 

But that’s not even the most absurd part! Viewers have been flocking to the Schwartz & Sandy’s Yelp page with such fervor that the restaurant reviewing company has chosen to temporarily disable users’ abilities to post content or comments to the restaurant’s page. The news has also spurred viewers, and even a cafe in Cornwall, New York, to announce that they were #TeamAriana. In all, this means that the next season of Vanderpump Rules is going to be, somehow, a thousand times more dramatic than the 10 that preceded it.

As so, I’ll be kicking off my weekend with a full rewatch of Vanderpump Rules on Peacock, and so should you. If you’ve never seen the show before, you’ve got a lot of episodes — and a lot of drunken fighting — to make your way through in order to prepare for the arrival of season 11, which will probably premiere sometime next year. I’ll be watching season 10 especially closely, like an elderly Harriet the Spy, for any clues and insinuations that should’ve made us suspect Leviss and Sandoval’s affair much sooner.

I’ve spent [redacted] hours this week falling down the TikTok rabbit hole and reading Reddit threads on Sandoval and Leviss’s affair, and I still can’t get enough. When I learned that the two infamous lovers had been wearing matching lightning bolt necklaces to secretly profess their love for one another, my heart nearly stopped at the sheer juiciness. As I argued in 2018, there is no restaurant show more over-the-top or entertaining than Vanderpump Rules, and this season’s romantic melodrama just made that assertion so much more true. — Amy McCarthy

Your weekend reading:

• For those who cannot get enough of the drama, here’s a full rundown of the #Scandoval from our pals at Vulture.
• In 2018, I made the case that Vanderpump Rules is the best restaurant TV guilty pleasure, and I’m just so grateful to #Scandoval for proving me right.
• Jezebel writer Kara Brown did a crawl of the Vanderpump restaurants in West Hollywood in 2015, and her experiences were objectively hilarious. 

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