January 20-26, 2005

food

Pack Mentality

last puff?: A smoking ban would protect bar staff but forbid patrons from lighting up. Photo By: Manuel Dominguez Jr

Some local bar and restaurant owners are happy with the proposed smoking ban, but others want the city to butt out.

by Juliet Fletcher

Nothing puts a damper on the warm, friendly atmosphere of a bar or restaurant than a visit from the Department of Licensing and Inspection. Whether they're checking the kitchen or scoping out the fire exits, their arrivals usually means a bad day for jittery owners.

Come summer, there may be one more box to check before they leave: a sweep for flicked ash or a sniff test for smoke. A new citywide smoking ban would cover all workplaces, but the greatest emphasis has been on those that count as "offices" for thousands of waitstaff: the city's bars and restaurants.

Councilman Michael Nutter tried to confiscate Philly's after-dinner smokes in 2001, but his bill failed. But a few weeks ago when Mayor Street said that implementing a smoking ban would be a priority, Nutter rediscovered enthusiasm for the goal. "What we're looking at is a piece of legislation which is comprehensive, provides maximum protection for workers and is uncomplicated in its approach," he explains. "We're looking to protect worker's rights. No one should have to risk their health to hold down a job."

So what does the restaurant community think? Worries about the details and economic effects of the legislation leave some owners on the fence: "It could be good, could be bad," says Stephen Simons, owner of the Khyber, near Second and Chestnut streets. "It appears that it's going to happen, so I guess I'm going to hope that it works out well. It doesn't seem to have adversely affected California, New York or Ireland." [See sidebar, "Smoked Out."]

Other owners have reservations about voicing an opinion on the issue. After all, piping up for the ban's advantages seems to alienate loyal smoking customers, and vice versa. One owner who isn't bound by that is Chris Ryan, nonsmoker and owner of Bridgid's, near the Art Museum, which went smoke-free in 2000. "The fourth person I knew died of smoking-related lung disease," Ryan explains, "and I came in one day and made this moral decision to go smoke-free on January 1." His employees said, "But everyone here smokes! You'll lose all our customers! You nonsmokers don't spend money!" But his business, he says, went up 10 percent during the week of the changeover.

Still, Ryan won't be unaffected by the ban. "I certainly like being in the minority, and thereby attracting a lot" of nonsmokers. Ban advocates claim the blanket ban will bring a level playing field, if only within city limits. But Patrick Conway, CEO of the Pennsylvania Restaurant Association, is concerned about the statewide picture. The state's existing Clean Indoor Air Act, which requires only restaurants of 75 seats or more to have a nonsmoking section, allows "first-class" cities to further tighten their rules. "We think this is an intrusive government mandate which could potentially close doors on some businesses in the city. You've already got a 10 percent drink tax across the bar in the city that doesn't exist in the suburbs, and now you're going to add a smoking ban, and it's going to put the hospitality industry in the city at a serious competitive disadvantage."

While other smokeless cities tend to see no significant economic slump, Conway had hoped the market would regulate itself. "We applaud when restaurants take their business smoke-free, but they make that decision based on what their customers are looking for, and because they've determined that they can succeed in business by doing so."

That's contested by Rachel Milenbach, director of tobacco control and prevention at the Southeastern Pennsylvania Health Promotion Council. "Government regulates restaurants all the time. They have signs up that employees need to wash their hands before going back to work, they need to refrigerate their meat and perishables at certain temperatures." The assertion of market freedom is, according to Milenbach, "a tobacco industry argument."

Nevertheless, even when workers' health conflicts with the freedom to run a business without restraint, Philly owners have tried hard to reach a personal compromise. Dirty Frank's owner Jay McConnell spent $4000 installing smoke-eaters at the bar. "I don't like smoking," he says, "I don't permit smoking in my home or in my car. But I think smoking goes with a drink. I'm against the ban; I don't think it can do anything but hurt us. I've taken precautions against cigarette smoke in here."

If customers agree with McConnell that drinking and smoking are an inseparable pair, bars may prove the hardest hit. "Most of my patrons are smokers," he says. Cigarettes "are sanctioned by the federal, state and city government, and we're permitted to sell them here! It's entirely legal, and the city is now going to arbitrarily ban it."

Mostly, McConnell objects to the system of fines used as a deterrent in most smoke-free cities. "In San Francisco, [bar-owners] are fined $50 a day out there. And they simply let people smoke and they add it as part of the expense of doing business. So I think that's just a grab for more money by the city; I think it's extortion and disagree with it entirely."

Meanwhile, others are prepared to adopt the new rules for the sake of staff. Sarah Stolfa, a McGlinchey's bartender whose portraits of the bar's regulars won her The New York Times' student photography prize, hopes to see the change take effect. "My view of the bar is completely different from someone who's just walked in. Behind the bar, you start to see the reality of people in a bar. For some, smoking and drinking becomes their life. People will complain, but I don't think the whole social structure of the bar would change any. I think it would hurt businesses at first, but people are always going to drink, so they'll come back."