The Cigar Manifesto : A ‘Considerate’ Smoker Asks His Fellow Diners to Be Civil Too

I smoke one cigar a day, usually after dinner. It’s just about the only activity that I find truly, utterly relaxing. Unfortunately, many people now seem to regard this modest self-indulgence as being somewhere between child molestation and gang rape. So I try to be considerate about it, especially in restaurants.

I don’t smoke in small, crowded, poorly ventilated restaurants or in pizza parlors, hamburger joints or other eateries not designed for lingering. Nor do I light up at 8 o’clock at night, when most people are still eating. Making latish reservations--8:30 or so--also helps; by the time I’m through with my meal and ready to smoke, virtually everyone else is also through eating (and most will be on their way home).

If anyone seated nearby looks as if he or she might object to my cigar--and such stern-faced, tight-lipped, beady-eyed folks are surprisingly easy to spot--I either ask if they mind or I voluntarily (albeit grumpily) forgo my post-prandial pleasure. If anyone at an adjacent table is still eating when I’m through--or if the adjacent table is jammed right against mine, whether its occupants are eating or not--I also ask if there’s any objection to my cigar.

In Europe--land of such cigar smokers as Byron, Tennyson and Churchill--no one has ever raised the slightest objection; there, as one friend says, a cigar is regarded as part of dinner--”like a fork or a glass of wine.” The French even speak of the “three C’s” after dinner--coffee, cognac and cigars. But in this country, most of my cigar-smoking friends say they now encounter so much hostility that they’ve given up trying to smoke in restaurants.

Fortunately, few people have objected to my cigar; even those who have objected have generally done so gently. A couple of months ago, at Fresco in Glendale, a group of women politely asked a friend and me not to smoke, so we took our cigars into the bar--for which they graciously thanked us; later, on their way out, the women thanked us again.

On another occasion, at La Toque in West Hollywood, a man responded to my cigar question by saying, “We’d appreciate it if you’d wait until we finish our dessert.” Ten minutes later, seconds after wiping the last crumbs of chocolate from his lips, the man leaned over and said, “We’re through now. Thank you for asking--and for waiting. You can smoke now.”

People have every right to object to cigar smoking, but why can’t they all be this civil about it? Must those people who think cigar smoking is a barbaric practice act like barbarians themselves--glaring malevolently and snarling at every cigar smoker as if he were Havana the Hun?

In my experience, it’s often (though not invariably) women who behave the most indignantly in the presence of a cigar. Although a number of famous women were cigar smokers--Virginia Woolf, Amy Lowell, George Sand--the hostility of many women today toward cigars is so virulent that I’m convinced they’re not motivated purely by dislike of the smell or by fear of the possible health hazard.

Maybe there’s something so symbolically, so resolutely masculine about cigars that the very sight of one--the very idea of one--enrages certain women. Perhaps they see it as emblematic of the abhorrent sexist discrimination, exploitation and exclusivity that many men have long practiced and that women have rightly struggled to overcome. Whatever the reason, some women have nastily objected to my cigars even though they were sitting 50 feet away--or outdoors, 10 rows away, at a baseball game. Some have complained about the smell of my cigar when they were not only sitting far away but when the smoke was blowing in the opposite direction.

Worse, women--and men--have objected to my cigar when they’re smoking cigarettes. I recognize that cigars can be more pungent than cigarettes--even when, as in my case, the cigar is not one of those vile-smelling, cheap cigars but a cigar of good quality--but I can’t understand how someone can chain-smoke cigarettes throughout dinner and then have the effrontery to demand that I not smoke a cigar when all of us have finished eating.

Recently, at Opera in Santa Monica, I lit my cigar a little earlier than usual but only after noticing that the nearest table was empty and that the three other closest tables all had people who had smoked cigarettes during dinner (and most of whom now appeared to be through eating); nonetheless, the maitre d’ told me there were “complaints” about my cigar. I stopped smoking immediately--as I always do when asked--but, I must admit, I was a bit belligerent about it this time.

Despite my generally good fortune in the Great Cigar Wars, I have encountered this cigarette/cigar dichotomy on several occasions. There have been other, equally unsettling cigar experiences from time to time, most recently at Obelisk, a nice Italian restaurant in Washington.

The menu at Obelisk said cigar and pipe smoking were “discouraged.” I probably would’ve refrained from smoking had I not felt a bit disgruntled by the rudeness and disingenuousness of the fellow who’d served our wine. Besides, only three other tables were still occupied when we finished eating--none adjacent to ours--and the only couple not through with dinner was sitting on the other side of the room.

My friend and I lit up.

The waiter rushed over and told us we couldn’t smoke cigars.

“But the menu only says it’s ‘discouraged,’ not ‘prohibited,’ ” I said.

“Well, I’m vehemently discouraging you,” he said.

“Check, please,” I said.

Then I walked to the three other tables still occupied. At each, I asked, as pleasantly as I could, “Excuse me, would it bother you if my friend and I smoked our cigars? If it would, please tell me and we won’t do it.”

One man said that if he were staying, it might bother him, but he was in the process of paying his check, so “go ahead.” The other two couples had no objections--and one man asked, laughing, if I had an extra cigar for him.

I reported the results of my survey to the waiter:

“None of your customers objects to our cigars.”

“Well, we object,” he said.

I suggested he state his objections more clearly on the menu.

Even worse, some restaurants have elitist policies on cigar smoking. After dinner at L’Orangerie in Beverly Hills several years ago, I saw a man light a cigar despite the presence of small cards on each table clearly forbidding cigars. When I asked the owner why this chap was being permitted to flout the rules, he said: “Do you see who’s with him--Elizabeth Taylor. That’s why.”

Wonderful. We cigar smokers don’t have enough problems; now we have to marry Liz Taylor if we want to light up.