Leva Bonaparte Levels Up: How the “Southern Hospitality ”Boss Built an Empire in Charleston

In an interview with PEOPLE, the Republic owner and 'Southern Charm' star opens up about balancing marriage, motherhood and her booming businesses

There's a screen in Leva Bonaparte's office showing her everything happening at Republic Garden & Lounge — the Charleston nightclub that serves as the setting for Bravo's acclaimed reality series, Southern Hospitality.

One might think that's how the entrepreneur can keep track of the drama between her many employees at the hot spot she co-owns with husband Lamar Bonaparte. But the truth is, Leva doesn't necessarily need surveillance to know the tea.

"Everyone's an open book here, so we all tend to hear about it anyway," Leva, 44, tells PEOPLE, during a visit to Republic last month. "Even though I'm the boss, they all come to me with their problems. And I'm a bit of a smother mother, so I don't mind it because I'm going to give you my opinion. Everyone will tell you, I advise to my demise, so I will say what I think. You just have to take it with a grain of salt and know that, 'Oh, she cares about me.' "

Related: Southern Hospitality Season 2 Trailer Teases Lies, Deceit and Betrayal: 'Things Went from 0 to 100'

That's clear to anyone who has watched Southern Hospitality, which began its second season earlier this month. But that care, she says, often comes in the form of "tough love," too — something that doesn't always go over well with her staff.

"Really, at the end of the day when I'm lying in bed, I just want to be able to be like, 'I had to make hard decisions sometimes, but generally, I did right by people,'" says Leva.

"There aren't a lot of women owners in the nightclub industry and I take that seriously," she continues. "It's important I create a safe environment for my employees; that I'm protecting them while also working hard, leading by example and encouraging them to actualize a part of their dream. It's a difficult balance and it can be lonely sometimes, but I've been working my entire life to get to this point."

Originally from Canada, Leva first came to Charleston 20 years ago when her family's multinational software company opened an office in the city. She'd spend months there over the next five years between extended stays in the business' South America and Canada branches.

Leva didn't immediately love life in the South Carolina locale. "Charleston was different back then," she says. "It was a lot smaller, a lot less diverse, not as developed, business wise — it just had a lot less of a big city feeling. And everyone knew everyone their whole lives, so it was a lot harder to make friends. So I didn't really know where I fit in here."

She also didn't love the lifestyle she was leading. "I'd meet people my age like, 'Oh, my God, you're living the dream job, traveling between all these places! Amazing!' And I'd be like, 'No, I don't ever want to look at a suitcase again!' I wanted a dog and a mug that I drink out of every day, you know what I mean? I wanted routine."

All that changed one night one Spring when, back in Charleston, her roommates dragged her out for a belated birthday celebration. That's the night she met Lamar.

Like her thoughts on Charleston, it wasn't love at first sight for Leva. "I really didn't want anything to do with him at first," she remembers. "I was very mean to him, to be honest. I thought he was cute and everything, but I was just dismissive of his romantic advances. I was like, 'You're probably full of s--.'"

Instead, Leva saw Lemar as a good business contact. "I was very much in work mode," she says. "He had told me he did real estate development, and I was interested in learning about that because in Canada, the tax laws were so different. So I was peppering him with questions. That was on my brain. I started looking him up on my Blackberry. He was like, 'Are you Googling me?' I was like, 'Yeah, bro, I am!'"

Obviously, romance was in the cards for Leva and Lemar. The two dated for five years before marrying in 2013. "We're very similar in a lot of ways," Leva says. "We're both big nerds who love to learn. You'll never not catch one of us reading or listening to a podcast or something, trying to find the new thing. And we both get a kick out of turning something into something else. I think that's really what drew us to one another."

"But also, he saw me for who I am early on, and he wasn't phased by it," Leva adds. "I'm very 'alpha female' and he not only understood that, but he embraced that. And I think it's because he's African-American, so he had this compassion for being a woman in business that most other men didn't. He was like, 'Yeah, it's the same when you're Black. Sometimes people misunderstand you or think you can't do it. But I believe in you.' So I felt very seen, and still do today."

That let Leva open up in ways she never had in a relationship before. "I needed to feel like I had somebody really strong in order to let down a lot of the stuff that I wouldn't typically with other guys," she says. "I used to just manhandle them, chew them up and spit them out — and that was never fun for me or fun for them. So meeting someone who was like, 'All right, relax, I got this' helped bring out that softer side of me."

Real estate was a bonding factor early on. Six months into meeting, the two bought a place downtown as an investment property. "Everyone was like, 'You're a lunatic. You're just dating a guy and you bought a place with him?' But I was able to separate the two. I was like, 'There's a contract. I am not a moron. I'm not buying a home with a picket fence. We're good!' "

Their venture into the nightlife and restaurant scene came by way of a fundraising effort they started during the real estate slump called "Party with a Purpose," which helped raise money for various nonprofits by throwing local mixers.

"We'd get a bunch of our friends together on a Wednesday or Thursday night to go to a different bar, and they'd donate at the door — because our thought was, 'Everyone's going to drink, they might as well drop $5 for charity anyway, what's the big deal?' " says Leva, who worked as a party promoter of sorts in college as well. "And eventually, the parties just grew and grew until it was like, 200, 300 people a night."

Watching the bar sales skyrocket, Leva and Lemar had an idea. "We kind of looked at each other day and were like, 'Wait, why don't we have our own space?' " she recalls. "And that's where it all started."

Knowing nothing about the industry, Leva and Lamar still jumped right in. "We're not sommeliers, not foodies, not chefs — not anything like that. But we are business people, so we just focused on making sure the numbers made sense, hired the right people, and YouTubed our way through the rest of it," she says.

In addition to Republic, the pair now own three restaurant/nightclub business properties on Charleston's popular King Street: Mesu, Bourbon N' Bubbles and their newest space, Lamar's Sporting Club.

Working together hasn't always been the easiest on Leva and Lemar's marriage. "It's very tricky," she admits. "It's not seamless, not easy and definitely not for the weak. I always say that when Lamar and I met, it was like a tsunami and a tornado met; it could be really cool, but you definitely want to stay out of the way. And I think it took us some time to get into the groove. where we could trust one another to be like, 'You get that, I'll get this.' "

One of the things they learned over the years is the importance of keeping their wheelhouse separate. "There was a time where work would bleed into the relationship a lot and that we had to put boundaries down where we'd say, 'This is the time where we don't talk about work,'" she notes. "And it's funny because, at the end of the day, those arguments we would have built beautiful things at the end of the day. But, is that healthy for our marriage all the time? No. So we had to back off."

She also learned to trust the foundation they had. "This is an industry that requires you to make a lot of sacrifice," Leva continues. "There are certain concessions that come with this field. Your weekends are no more. Your holidays are no more. I mean, I haven't had a New Year's Eve in 20 years! And often before of that, Lamar and I, we're passing ships. He's at one spot while I'm a home, or here's home while I'm there. So you have to have a good base and trust that you're both working on a parallel path. You can so easily get caught in the weeds otherwise."

Along the way, Leva and Lamar became parents. She gave birth to their son Lamar "Little" Bonaparte, Jr. on Jan. 29, 2018, after a long journey trying to get pregnant. That experience made motherhood, Leva says, her top priority.

"I definitely am very present. [as a mom]," she explains. "From the minute he was born, I just wanted to soak it all up and keep it all. So in the sense, I feel like my infertility issues and the struggles I went through to have Little were a little bit of a blessing in disguise, because I never took anything for granted. The worst days, the hardest days. I was just like, "I'm just so glad this little guy's here.' "

Splitting time between being a mom, a wife and a boss dominated Leva's next few years. But in 2020, Leva added a new job to her busy schedule when she joined the cast of Southern Charm for its seventh season.

Related: Leva Bonaparte on Being Southern Charm's First Cast Member of Color: 'I'm No Rookie'

Being a reality star was never something Leva had planned. "I've known those guys forever," says Leva, who had appeared on the Bravo show as a guest every year since it premiered in 2014. "I was Cameran Eubanks' roommate for a time, and Craig [Conover] used to always be in my bars, running up to me like, 'I think that girl's cute, can you introduce me?' So I had a natural connection to the group. But I didn't think I fit the mold of the show because I'm not Southern."

She met with producers ahead of season 7, thinking they were interested in exploring the logistics of a potential storyline developing at the time involving Conover. "Craig and I were talking about him joining Bourbon N' Bubbles as a part-owner and kind of becoming the face of it," she explains. "So when producers came to town and they asked to meet with me, and I thought it was to talk about Craig, what sort of things we'd film there, etc. And about halfway through our conversation they were like, 'Why are you talking about Craig so much? We want you to be on the show.'"

"I was so jarred," she continues. "And when I told them. 'But I'm not Southern,' they said to me, 'No, but you're Charleston. You represent the new South. Anyone who comes here knows you and Lamar, and we want to grow the show into what this city is about now."

Related: Leva Bonaparte Says She Was Nervous to Talk About Race on Southern Charm

Over the years on Southern Charm, Leva's been able to do just that. A measured voice of reason among the cast, she's tackled big topics on the show like the South's issue with race while also confronting some of the more complicated dynamics within the show's tight-knight friend circle.

It wasn't always easy — and wasn't always embraced, especially while advocating for equality at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement.

"So many people in the beginning were just venomous to me, as if I was ruining their show by simply being myself," she says. "And look, I'm human, I'm not going to be perfect. But I was never trying cancel anyone. I was trying to show that, 'Hey, we're all human, we all make mistakes. We're all going to say things we regret. But we have to talk through these things if we're going to be better.' And I think, by the end of it, people really saw that because the messages changed from 'I hate you' to 'Thank you for helping me understand.' "

That philosophy of learning through mishaps is something Leva also learned in business.

"My successes are just literally sitting on top of a gazillion mistakes," she stresses. "During the real estate slump when we were raising money for charity, we were also going bankrupt. All our properties were foreclosing. It was a s--- show. But we felt good doing something to help other people who were in worse situations, and that led to another business venture we didn't anticipate. So it's not about how you fall down, it's about how you get back up."

Leva stresses those very values to all 150+ employees at her businesses but especially those at Republic, the setting of her Southern Charm spinoff Southern Hospitality.

The series was something Leva strategically thought about when she first joined Southern Charm. "We had been approached before about doing a show, but the timing wasn't right. So when I was in the process of interviewing for Southern Charm and they were asking me all these questions my businesses and the dynamics between me and employees, my wheels were turning and I think theres were too," she remembers. "And there was definitely part of me that was like, 'I would rather soft launch myself on an established show than try and do a show my own coming out of nowhere.' I was thinking long game."

One key element in the pitch-process for Leva was highlighting the diversity of Republic's staff.

"I wanted to show the complexity of a true working space and the real variety of people merging within it night after night," she says. "Southern Charm viewers, for so long, were used to seeing one type of person. And from the jump, I wanted them to see a spectrum of stories. Yes, it was about having a cast made up of people from different races and different sexual orientations. But we also have people with all different financial backgrounds, too — from the trust fund kid living at home in their parents' mansion to the single parent, trying to make ends meet. And they all have different lifestyles, too. Like, Maddi [Reese] is sober, Bradley [Carter] is a personal trainer on the side. So I really fought during development to build something unique."

Many viewers initially compared the show to Vanderpump Rules, with Leva in the Lisa Vanderpump position. And while the dating dynamics amid the tight-knit staff might be familiar, Southern Hospitality is a different beast. "Vanderpump itself has its own magical thing, but our show is a very different beast," Leva says. "Club life has an entirely different set of pressures put upon it than restaurant life. So we're like the love child of Vanderpump and Below Deck because it has the glitz and glam, but it's also the chaos and pressure of having to please and entertain clients in a really, elevated way."

"It's insane," she adds. "It's a high-pressure job. You have hundreds of people at the door, everyone's drinking. And that's why I always say, 'Showtime.' You have to be about your wits. You have to be on top of everything. This is not, 'Oh, your dinner was cold.' This is a different type of game that we're playing."

There's also a different type of employee working at Republic. "These kids want to be in this business," Leva stresses. "They're not trying to be actors and musicians and this and that. The majority of them want to be in hospitality. So, it's different there."

Working in the nightlife industry has created a close bond among the Southern Hospitality cast, Leva says. "On one hand, the pressure keeps them together because no matter how mad they are, they need each other through the night, you know what I mean? Everyone around you is drinking, and there's a lot of stress and they got to set that s--- aside and just be like, 'Cover me.' But they're also working a schedule where most of their friends outside of Republic aren't. We're night people. So you spend even more time together because who else is up at that hour?"

And while Southern Hospitality is very different than Vanderpump Rules, that's not to say Leva wouldn't mind following in the success of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills spinoff, which will debut its 11th season next month.

"Oh, I definitely want that kind of longevity, for sure," she says. "I mean, I would like it for everyone involved, — not just the cast, but for the showrunner, the producers, the crew members, glam... I'm always think about other people's careers. So yeah, I want that for everyone. I want all of us to win, and I want the viewer to enjoy something new and fresh."

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Southern Hospitality's success so far has already had an impact on Republic, which is more popular than ever. But Leva, for all she's achieved in life, knows that there are always more goals to hit for both the business and the show — and she won't achieve either if she's comparing herself to others.

"If someone's running a race, they're running, not looking at who's next to them. And so right now, I'm not going to compare myself," she said. "They have their own magic, and we have our own magic. There's plenty of room for everyone to succeed. If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that."

Southern Hospitality airs Thursdays at 9 pm. ET on Bravo.

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