A Place for Fellas to Light Up Panatelas
A few years ago, having finished dinner with my sister and her husband in their Denver home, I asked if I might smoke a cigar.
“Yes, if you do it outside,” my sister said.
Outside, it was 16 below.
I skipped the cigar.
Many cigar-smoking friends have had to make similar decisions in recent years as tolerance for smoking of any kind--and cigar smoking in particular--has all but evaporated from American life, even when the cigar smoker tries to be considerate of others (as some, alas, do not).
A Remedy for Ghastly State of Affairs
Henry Schielein has decided to do something about this ghastly state of affairs.
Schielein is the 55-year-old general manager of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Laguna Niguel, and earlier this month he announced that the hotel’s “library”--a cozy, elegant, wood-paneled room just off the main lobby, filled with antiques and lined with books--henceforth would be used exclusively as a smokers’ room in the evenings.
Although pipe smokers and cigarette smokers will be welcome in the room, too, Schielein conceived it primarily for cigar smokers, he being so devoted to cigar smoking that when he got married 25 years ago, he made his proposal contingent on his fiancee’s acceptance of his cigars “for the rest of our lives.”
“I love smoking a good cigar,” he says, “and, selfishly, I wanted a place in the hotel where I and other lovers of the leaf could light up without being glared at. But I also figured that if we had such a room, people who don’t like cigars would appreciate it, too, because then they wouldn’t have to be subjected to cigars in the dining room. Everyone would be happy.”
Everyone was certainly happy on the night recently when Schielein inaugurated the smokers’ room with a black-tie, invitation-only, $175-a-person dinner for 60 in a private banquet room at the hotel.
Guests came from New York, Dallas, Chicago and Carefree, Ariz., as well as from Los Angeles and Orange counties, and they included cigar aficionados of all stripes--a couple of wine merchants, a couple of food and wine society bigwigs, a half-dozen cigar manufacturers, two Marine Corps generals, two doctors, an actor, three journalists, executives from the Ritz-Carlton and several other hotels and several local businessmen (one of whom wore a red and white burnoose and sunglasses throughout).
Post-Prandial Trip
The evening began with champagne in the hotel’s Monarch Bay Courtyard, where a number of the guests lit their first cigars even before they’d taken their first sip. Then everyone moved inside for dinner, a few puffing sporadically as they ate but most saving their cigars for the post-prandial trip to the library.
The dinner itself wasn’t particularly memorable--pate, consomme, steak, fresh berries in zabaglione; a sherry and four California wines--but it was all eminently acceptable (better, in fact, than I’d expected), and, as Schielein said, “This evening isn’t about food and wine. Dinner is just a prelude. The evening is about cigars.”
Indeed it was.
Schielein explained to the assembled guests--all seated around one large, rectangular table--that he first thought of having a smokers’ room after he took over as general manager of the Ritz-Carlton in Boston in 1983. He had finished eating in the dining room there one night, he said, and he was smoking his cigar when he sensed that people were glaring at him.
A Place to Congregate
He decided to spare both himself and his guests such discomfort by creating a place where cigar smokers could congregate.
Guests at last week’s dinner saluted Schielein for that decision, and Richard DiMeola, president of Consolidated Cigar Co., drew the evening’s most sustained applause--accompanied by much good-natured cheering and table-pounding--when he noted that “Henry turned the ladies’ tearoom into a gentlemen’s smoking room at night.”
Now Schielein has a smoking room at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, too, and when guests at the inaugural dinner walked into the room for the first time after dinner last week, they found more awaiting them than Chippendale tables, 18th-Century English club chairs, an antique Kashan rug and free copies of the book, “101 Ways to Answer the Request ‘Would You Please Put Out That Cigar’ ” (sample retort: “If Churchill had put out his cigar, we’d all be speaking German today”).
On a large table in the center of the room were more than 1,000 cigars--40 or 50 open boxes, representing 20 different brands, donated by various cigar-makers for the evening’s festivities. Port and various other after-dinner drinks will routinely be served in the library, and on this night, guests found an open bar for digestifs --including a 1939 DeMontal Armagnac and two prestige, top-of-the-line cognacs, Louis XIII from Remy Martin and Paradis from Hennessy.
Like Greedy Children at a Candy Store
For just a few seconds, the guests milled around the table, a bit tentative about taking the cigars, most of which probably would have sold for $2 to $6 each. (No Havanas, alas.) Guests would reach for one cigar--an H. Upmann, perhaps, or a Davidoff Zino--then wonder aloud if, no, maybe they should try a Partagas or a Pleiades or an A. Fuentes instead. Then, almost collectively, they’d decide, well, they could smoke one now and tuck one or two in their inside tux pockets for the next day. Before long, like greedy, wide-eyed children in the world’s largest candy store, they were happily grabbing with both hands, stuffing all their pockets, carefully overturning partially filled boxes and refilling them with their personal selections from the other boxes. All the cigars were soon gone--as they were supposed to be.
It’s unlikely that many guests left the room with fewer than 20 or 25 cigars each, and I saw at least two men leave with probably double that number, a full box in each hand. Both men were positively burbling with delight.
I was pretty happy, too--$175 poorer but possessed of 19 nice cigars to add to my humidor at home.