Degen Pener previously wrote about why more people working in Hollywood seem to be smoking cigarettes.
Once upon a time, Los Angeles basked obliviously under the West Coast sun in the belief that we had it relatively good when it came to humankind’s age-old nemesis: rats. At least we didn’t have problems on the order of infamously infested New York City, the long-undisputed rat capital of the USA. NYC has long had a well-deserved reputation for having the chonkiest, filthiest vermin in the country. Up until 2024, NYC residents simply put most trash bags out on the street, creating veritable buffets for the fearless foragers. (Two years ago, New York began the process of requiring secure bins for all trash, an initiative that is due to be fully rolled out by… 2031.)
And don’t even get us started on Pizza Rat — we still have nightmares.
But Los Angeles is nothing if not competitive, and lately our local vermin appear to be ready for their close-up, in some of the city’s most exclusive establishments no less.
In the past two months, a slew of Hollywood-loved restaurants, clubs and hotels have been dinged by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health for vermin issues. They range from the industry-dense private members club San Vicente Bungalows, The Valorian Hotel (formerly the Mondrian) and the Peninsula Beverly Hills to Dan Tana’s in WeHo, Genghis Cohen on Fairfax and Jitlada (famed for its incredibly spicy Thai cuisine) in Hollywood.
A key caveat, as these headlines see heavy rotation on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, is that rats weren’t necessarily the issue in all cases; when it comes to vermin, the health department’s inspection reports broadly cite businesses for the presence of “insects, rodents, birds or animals” without going into further detail. (Rodents could also mean mice or squirrels.)
Still, the narrative has taken hold: Rat numbers must be rising, and the ritzier the affected establishment, the louder the chatter. On social media, comments range from grossed-out reactions (“How in the hell did these places get so bad that the board of health has to CLOSE YOU DOWN?! So disgusting.”) to hot takes (“Is Disney filming a new live action Ratatouille in Los Angeles?”).
For this story, I reached out to teams at those businesses, hospitality workers and PR reps, animal experts and other sources close to the action (nearly all declined to comment) to understand how restaurants are responding, how wide the infestations really are, what could be causing them and what to do about them. Read on for the details — and yes, they are dirty — plus some reassuring reality checks from rodent pros.
‘Inexplicable for a Place Like This’
Most of the restaurants that made news were briefly shut down by the county, reopening within two or three days after addressing problems. At the Peninsula, the issue wasn’t rodents, according to general manager Offer Nissenbaum, but insects. “The Roof Garden kitchen was temporarily closed due to the discovery of a small, single-digit number of insects in an area that services our outdoor restaurant,” Nissenbaum tells me. “It is important to note this was strictly limited to one area, and all of our other kitchens and all areas of the hotel remained fully open, operational and unaffected, with A hygiene ratings achieved.”
At San Vicente Bungalows — where regular guests include stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Aniston and members include scores of top execs and creators — an event kitchen (separate from the main restaurant kitchen) was temporarily shuttered in April due to the presence of vermin. Says a spokesperson for the private members club, “Our main kitchen — which serves all guests — was inspected the same day, was never cited, never closed, and continues to hold an A rating today. The club remained fully open and operating as usual throughout.” However, according to Page Six Hollywood, the club has launched an internal probe (with a possible reward of $10K) into whether an employee planted a dead rat inside the premises. The spokesperson had no comment on the reported investigation.
“It just seems sort of inexplicable for a place like this,” says an SVB member (who requested anonymity), adding that if in fact a staffer brought in the rat, “it just feels like something out of a show, like Palm Royale meets the new season of Beef.”
Whether these cases represent a genuine surge or merely a string of isolated incidents amplified in the Thunderdome of social media is a subject of debate amid those on the front lines of the Los Angeles hospitality scene. “Personally, I think there has always been an issue with rats in L.A., but it’s never been highlighted and socialized as much as it is right now,” says a local restaurant publicist who doesn’t want her name used. Adds a manager of a café in the Fairfax District (who also requested anonymity), “These things come in waves. One thing gets out and it kind of steamrolls and everything gets connected right away. Personally I don’t think it’s a major issue. I wouldn’t say [rats in L.A.] are necessarily any worse than any other major city.”
‘Huge Increase’
But beyond the barrage of recent social media postings, there are indications that Los Angeles is seeing a rise in rat populations. Last October, pest control company Orkin released its annual list of the Top 50 Rattiest Cities in America and for the first time ever, L.A. topped the list, pushing Chicago from the top spot and outranking New York, which came in at No. 3. The company ranks the list by the number of new requests for rodent services in the cities it serves. Notes Kayce Bell, Ph.D., associate curator of terrestrial mammalogy at Los Angeles County’s Natural History Museum, “[Orkin’s list] is based on the number of extermination calls that they get. So they’re not actually counting numbers of rats.” Still, the City of Angels won a similar dubious honor from Yelp late last year too, claiming the No. 1 spot on its list of the “Top cities for rodent services,” which the platform puts together by analyzing searches on the site that include the word “rodent.”
At Tashman Home Center in West Hollywood, co-manager Sarah Tashman says she’s noticed a sharp spike in sales of rodent-control products in the last six months. “I don’t know what’s going on in L.A., but we have absolutely seen an uptick in business in every category, whether that’s homes or restaurants,” she says. “We have people come in basically every day grabbing multiple different types of traps. We are seeing a huge increase.”
A spokesperson for L.A. County’s Department of Public Health did not immediately respond to a request as to whether rodent infestations are currently on the rise across the area.
Restaurants Zip Lips
So what’s behind the apparent increase? Climate change could be a culprit. Rat populations in 11 major cities around the world, including San Francisco, have gone up in tandem with rising temperatures, according to a report published in Science Advanced in 2025. The journal’s analysis theorizes that a growing number of warmer days creates more opportunities for rodents to find food and reproduce. (L.A. wasn’t included in the study because of a lack of systematic records of rat sightings.)
According to wildlife experts and restaurant pros whom I spoke with, other factors that may play a role include trash accumulation across the city (as Los Angeles struggles to provide basic services to residents); a string of wetter-than-average winters that have increased water availability and vegetation growth; and an increase in outdoor dining areas at restaurant that took off during Covid. Construction activity can also spike rat sightings, as disruptions can send them scurrying to find new homes. Developers broke ground on nearly 4,000 new apartment units in the first quarter of 2026, according to recent data from Colliers, the highest number since late 2022.
While the rats are making plenty of noise, the humans have gone remarkably quiet: Few in the restaurant business want to talk about rodent problems. I reached out to half a dozen publicists around town who work with restaurant clients to see if any owners or chefs would discuss the issue. All either declined or never responded, with one writing back: “None of my clients will speak about rats, unfortunately, on or off the record.”
I also called two top pest-control companies, Western Exterminator and Ronin, requesting interviews about rats in L.A., but no one from either business could be reached for comment. Someone from a third exterminator business, asking that their company not be named, wrote back to say, “Our restaurant customers requested that we not share their information, especially about having rodent issues.”
The reticence is understandable, especially given the challenges local restaurants have suffered through in recent years, from ongoing inflation to the 2023 writers’ strike and more. “From the pandemic to the fires, everything is being thrown at these small businesses in terms of Hollywood-esque doomsday moments,” says Seth Beard, the founder of the Instagram account @SethontheScene, which covers restaurant openings and closings in and around West Hollywood.
While hot spots like the San Vicente Bungalows and Dan Tana’s presumably won’t see any permanent drop in customers — indeed two members of SVB tell me they’ve been there within the last few days and the club was as packed as ever — less buzzy businesses may suffer. “For a small mom-and-pop, [a closure for vermin] could be just crippling to their business,” adds Beard.
Real Rat Risks
Rats of course aren’t merely a PR nightmare but also a genuine public health concern. The main species of rats found around L.A. are black rats (Rattus rattus) and brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) — two hyper-adaptable species that have followed humankind to almost every place we inhabit across the planet. Rats can carry a number of diseases and parasites, which they can spread directly or indirectly to humans, including leptospirosis, rat-bite fever, salmonella and rat lungworm. (Rat lungworm, a parasite that can cause severe neurological symptoms, was found in animals at the San Diego Zoo in March, marking the first time it has appeared in California beyond isolated cases, the Los Angeles Times reported.) Rats also are a known spreader of the fleas that carry typhus, which is currently reaching record levels in Los Angeles.
In rare cases, rats can transmit hantavirus, which has a 35 percent fatality rate among humans who are infected, and recently was found aboard the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius. Three passengers have died, of which one person was confirmed as having been infected. Gene Hackman’s wife, Betsy Arakawa Hackman, died in New Mexico last year from a hantavirus infection.
But both Bell of the Natural History Museum and wildlife biologist Rebecca Gooley, Ph.D. believe alarm over rats often soars out of proportion to the risks. “Any wild animal or any other species [including] other humans we interact with, we all have the potential of passing various bacteria and viruses to each other,” says Gooley, who objects to the “intensity” of fear around rats.
Adds Bell, “I don’t want rats living in my house personally, right? But I don’t want to scaremonger it either. I work with wild animals a lot, and it’s not a high concern for me about contracting disease from wild rodents.”
What Works to Combat Rats
Rodent-control measures for restaurants are about what you’d expect: By email, a spokesperson for the Department of Public Health says they should include “eliminating food sources by securing garbage bins and cleaning up food waste at the end of shift and preventing entry by ensuring all doors properly seal at the bottom and eliminating gaps around pipes entering the building.” The health department also encourages restaurants to develop a management plan with a licensed pest-control operator. (According to one manager in the restaurant business, service plans with exterminator companies can cost restaurants anywhere from “a couple hundred a month to almost a thousand, depending on how severe a problem is.”)
Squeamish Angelenos should follow the same basic precautions at home. Make sure to make sure no food is left out, inside or outside — that includes picking up fruit fallen from trees, which is particularly appealing to rodents.
Another way to combat rats is through old-fashioned spring-loaded traps. Unfortunately, an increasingly ineffective tool is setting out bait stations loaded with rodenticides as rats are evolving ever-greater tolerance to rat poisons. “They sometimes call it an arms race because the rats are able to evolve resistance to those rodenticides — and so then they make harsher rodenticides that then the rats really evolve resistance to, and then meanwhile those rodenticides are actually seeping into other parts of the food chain,” says Bell.
One promising alternative to poison is rat birth control, which is being trialed in a number of cities around the country using bio-based bait products, such as Evolve, that reduce rodent fertility. “We’re trying to bring the numbers down in a more humane way for both rats and mice and also in a less harmful way for the ecosystem,” says Gooley, who works with a nonprofit, Wisdom Good Works, that’s piloting its own herbal-based rat birth control.
But for every rat that’s spotted and dispensed with — whether at a restaurant or in your garden — there are many more being born in the shadows (a female rat can have four to six litters per year), using their evolutionary superpowers to adapt to the poisons we create and clawing ever harder to access our food systems.
Says Gooley, “I think they’re gonna be here forever beside us.”
