Club Ripples

What happened after

The Long Beach Press-Telegram reports the club, one of the city's oldest gay bars (operating since the early 1970s/80s under owners John Garcia and Larry Hebert), closed its doors at the end of 2019.

Closure date on record: 2019

What happened on the show

This season four episode marked one of the show's first moves beyond salons, as the newly retitled Tabatha Takes Over brought the format to Club Ripples, a bar in Long Beach, California. The takeover method carried over intact: Coffey embeds in the business, delivers her trademark blunt assessments, restructures the staff, and stages a renovation reveal, now applied to a nightlife venue rather than a hair salon. Because no synopsis survives for this installment, we do not reconstruct the specific scenes. The documented facts are the format, the season's expansion beyond salons, and the setting, a longtime Long Beach bar taken through the overnight process. Coffey's premise held even off the salon floor, that a struggling business usually reflects its leadership, and that an honest reset was the point of the visit.

After the cameras left

Club Ripples has closed. The Long Beach Press-Telegram reported that the club, one of the city's oldest gay bars and operating since the early 1970s or 1980s under its longtime owners, closed its doors at the end of 2019. No reopening or successor business was found, and a co owner's 2025 obituary further corroborates the venue's closure. The local news report and corroborating obituary make this a high confidence closure. A long lived Long Beach institution, now gone.