More Troublesome Smoke Signals

When Carol Herman took her mother out to dinner at the Lotus Pavilion in Arcadia recently, she requested a “no smoking” table. After the soup, Herman writes, she “became aware of smoke coming from two tables away where a woman was actually chain-smoking.”

Later, a man sitting at the very next table “pushed away his sliced orange (which this restaurant serves as dessert) and lit up.”

Herman complained to the hostess who had seated her (and who had apparently acceded to her request for a smokeless dinner) and was told that the restaurant wasn’t really large enough to have a nonsmoking section but that the Herman party had been seated away from large table groupings in the hope that nobody near them would smoke.

“I would like to know how to handle a situation like this in the future,” Herman writes. “What are a person’s rights when he or she is dining out? Can a restaurant owner sit you anywhere and then say it’s up to his customers not to smoke?”

Well, yes, pretty much. Herman said that when she consulted him later, the owner of this particular establishment told her he was waiting for a nationwide smoking ban to be passed so that he wouldn’t have these problems anymore. In the meantime, there isn’t much that smaller restaurants can do to keep smokers and nonsmokers apart.

The Lotus Pavilion was wrong, of course, to have not explained the situation clearly to Herman and her mother at the outset. The hostess should have simply said, “We don’t have a nonsmoking section, but I’ll try to give you a table away from smokers.” Then Herman could have chosen not to patronize the place or to take her chances, as she wished.

Until laws are passed to the contrary, a nonsmoking customer in a small restaurant has no legal right to a smoke-free meal, and it’s a bit ingenuous to expect the contrary. Folks smoke. Still. Myself among them, sometimes. I will always respond to polite requests to put out a cigarette or blow smoke in another direction in an intimate space, but I can’t guarantee that all smokers will do the same.

I’m sorry Herman’s meal was ruined by smokers--apparently they refused to stop or she didn’t ask them to--but that is ultimately, like it or not, the luck of the draw.

SIDE ORDERS: Reflections Restaurant in La Canada hosts its second annual Food and Wine Gourmet Gala from 1 to 5 this afternoon, to benefit the La Canada Unified School District. Tickets are $45 per person and will entitle the bearer to sample the wares of such restaurants as the Crocodile Cafe and the Parkway Grill of Pasadena, the Savannah Grill of Newport Beach, Stepps of Los Angeles and, of course, Reflections itself, and of such wineries as Chateau Montelena, Trefethen, Lyeth, Caymus and Flora Springs, among many others. . . . Next Sunday, the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena will celebrate A Taste of Asia, described as its first Food, Wine & Brew Festival. Food from Woo Lae Oak, the New Otani Hotel & Garden, Chopstix, Tito Rey of the Islands, the Siamese Princess, Talesai, Aashiana Cuisine of India and Cafe Jacoulet, among other restaurants, will be featured, and there will be wines from Austria, Australia, New Zealand and California, beers from Japan and the Philippines, a tea tasting, Asian music of various kinds, a Chinese cooking demonstration and who knows what else. Admission is $35 in advance and $40 at the door. Information: (818) 449-2742. . . . Santa Barbara County’s Santa Ynez Winery has announced a series of six “casually elegant” twilight dinners on the winery lawn, over four weekends from May 28 to Aug. 27. Information: (805) 688-8381. . . . And “Babette’s Feast”--the fancy old style French dinner served locally at L’Ermitage in conjunction with the Academy Award-winning film of the same name, is being offered at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel as well. . . .