Classic French Restaurant Pamplemousse Closes Permanently After 44 Years in Las Vegas

Pamplemousse Le Restaurant, the 44-year-old French restaurant on Sahara Avenue, will not reopen. Owner Diana Maisondieu-LaForge, the widow of restaurant founder Georges LaForge, tells the Las Vegas Review-Journal that losing convention business cut about one third of the classic restaurant’s customers.

The state shut down nonessential businesses including casinos and restaurants in March, and most conventions, one of the lifelines of the restaurant industry in Las Vegas, canceled plans into 2021 since the state mandated that most events could only host up to 250 people maximum.

Pamplemousse, a hidden gem for both locals and celebrities alike, was one of the oldest restaurants in Las Vegas.

LaForge originally opened a creperie dubbed The Morning After in 1973 after he moved to Las Vegas in 1962 from Paris, where he worked at the Lido. He worked as a bus boy and then chef and showroom captain at the Desert Inn, where he met singer and headliner Bobby Darin, who suggested name the restaurant “pamplemousse,” which means grapefruit in French, because it was “the most beautiful in the French language,” the RJ reports. The word served as an inspiration for the restaurant that opened in 1976.

LaForge died of liver cancer last year in March.

The 2,051-square-foot restaurant is on the market. Loopnet says the building, originally constructed in 1952, includes a separate storage area

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