barBar Rescue · Season 1, Episode 8 · Aired September 11, 2011
Champs Sports Pub
Burbank, California
This one survived. It remains in business.
What happened after
Sports bar at 4103 W Burbank Blvd; still operating under the original name with active hours, official site, and recent reviews.
What happened on the show
Once iconic and now sliding, Champs Sports Pub in Burbank had an owner who had grown neglectful and taken to blaming an inexperienced staff for problems that started well above them. At 4103 West Burbank Boulevard, Taffer found a room coasting on a reputation its own operator was actively eroding, the crew set up to fail by a boss who had stopped leading and started scapegoating. The rescue worked to make the owner own the bar again, to retrain the staff he had neglected and to remind him that the failures he pinned on others traced back to his own disengagement. Taffer kept the Champs name through the reveal, a clear signal that the identity still held equity in Burbank once the operation behind it was straightened out. The bet here was simple and, for this show, refreshingly unglamorous: fix the leadership and the training, keep the name the neighborhood already knew, and let a genuine local institution stand back up on its own feet.
After the cameras left
Champs is a survivor. It is still operating under its original name at the same Burbank address, with active hours, an official site and recent reviews. One 2026-dated Yelp review makes the through-line explicit, noting the writer found the place because of Bar Rescue and calling it one of the few bars that have survived. For a show whose closure rate runs high, an iconic name that simply kept going counts as a clean win.
Sources
Confidence: high. Last checked 2026-07-19.