Fired Up : Restaurateurs See Red Over Proposed L.A. Smoking Ban

“It’s an invasion of my rights,” Jacqueline Hughes declared as she puffed on a cigarette at La Golondrina restaurant on a recent day.

Under a proposed Los Angeles ordinance, Hughes and three other smokers at the Olvera Street eatery would have been prohibited from lighting up--and the thought of that made her angry. “If I want to put myself at risk, that’s my right!” said the Inglewood office worker.

The owner of La Golondrina is not happy either. Vivien Bonzo estimates that 30% of her customers are smokers, and she fears losing that business. “Smokers want to smoke right after a meal, and I think our smoking customers would avoid restaurants where they can’t,” she said.

The city’s estimated 10,000 restaurants would become smoke-free under an ordinance proposed in May by City Councilman Marvin Braude. Citing the reported health dangers of “secondhand smoke,” Braude moved to toughen current laws that require nonsmoking areas in restaurants with seating for more than 50.

The restaurant industry opposes a full smoking ban, saying it would be unfair to smoking customers and would hurt business.

“What smokers do is they kill themselves slowly, and that should be their prerogative,” said Renzo Roder, general manager of Harry’s Bar in Century City. “They deserve their place in society, and we should make space for them.”

Warned Ron Salisbury, owner of Sonora Cafe and El Cholo: “It would be a repeat of what happened in Beverly Hills.”

A Beverly Hills ban on smoking in restaurants lasted 2 1/2 months, from April to July of 1987. While some of that city’s 125 restaurants had reported a 30% drop in business during the ban, state records showed about a 9% drop in taxable sales, compared to a year earlier.

After intense pressure, the Beverly Hills City Council amended its ordinance and now requires that 60% of each dining room be set aside for nonsmokers.

In Los Angeles, Braude said he introduced his motion after reports in May that the federal Environmental Protection Agency will declare secondhand smoke a known carcinogen that causes 3,00 cancer cases in nonsmokers each year. A council committee is expected to take up the matter this month.

About 400 municipalities in 30 states have passed various forms of smoking limits in restaurants, according to Mark Pertschuk, executive director of Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights, a Berkeley-based national organization that works for nonsmoking legislation. In California, 171 cities and counties have such laws.

The only city with a 100% smoking ban is Aspen, Colo., which passed its ordinance in 1985. In addition to Los Angeles, similar bans are under consideration in Abilene, Tex., and New Hanover County, N.C., Pertschuk said.

Aspen officials said recently that the city had encountered no major enforcement problems and that the estimated 65 restaurants there have not lost business.

“They jammed it down our throats and we screamed and kicked,” said Tim Cottrell, president of the Aspen Restaurant Assn. and owner of the Smuggler Land Office restaurant. “But in fact it hasn’t been as bad as we anticipated. It has not been a big problem. It’s an idea whose time has probably come.”

The Aspen law allows smoking in bar areas, Cottrell noted, and he keeps three tables in that area of his restaurant available for smokers. “There are far more requests for nonsmoking, and those tables by no means stay full with smokers.”

But Los Angeles restaurateurs point out that Aspen patrons are a captive audience and cannot easily travel outside the resort city to eat. Los Angeles smokers could just go to adjacent communities such as Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, West Hollywood or unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, where smoking is allowed in designated sections, they say.

“If the law covered the entire state, or at least the county, then it would be more acceptable,” Roder said of Braude’s proposal.

Joe Patti, chairman of the Beverly Hills Restaurant Assn. and owner of the La Famiglia Restaurant, said he was convinced that many patrons simply went to eat in Los Angeles during the 1987 smoking Ban in Beverly Hills.

If Braude’s proposal becomes law, the shoe would be on the other foot, he said with a laugh. “They’re going to come back to Beverly Hills.”

Some Los Angeles restaurants already ban smoking entirely on their premises, and report no loss of business because of their decision. Lee Rivera, who owns the Europa restaurant in Sherman Oaks with her husband, Stan, said the two made their decision four years ago.

“Business has not decreased at all,” Rivera said. “Most people thank me on their hands and knees.”

The Calabasas-based Good Earth Restaurants & Bakery, which has four Los Angeles franchise restaurants among 34 nationwide, imposed its own nonsmoking ban in October, marketing director Bryon Foster said. As a chain that specializes in serving fresh meats and vegetables with no preservatives or additives, Foster said the decision came about because “we felt it went along with our image.”

But some restaurant owners believe the separate dining sections mandated under the current city law do a good-enough job of protecting nonsmokers. “It’s worked out rather well,” California Restaurant Assn. spokesman Marc DiDomenico said, “because there’s enough flexibility in it that provides for all customers.”

Said Stan Kyker, executive vice president of the California Restaurant Assn.: “It’s not the same as the closeness inside an airplane. . . . Many or most restaurants have air-circulating equipment that moves the air around.”

But some nonsmokers disagreed. “Just dividing a restaurant between smokers and nonsmokers is not a meaningful solution,” said Ted Heyck, a Los Feliz resident who works as a deputy city attorney in Los Angeles, as he dined at La Golondrina last week. “You end up with smoke. Smoke doesn’t divide itself.”

About 177 municipalities in California have laws affecting smoking in elevators, health facilities, on public transportation, in workplaces or restaurants. The varied nonsmoking measures in effect around California seem to pose few enforcement problems, according to officials in several cities.

Ted Goldstein, spokesman for the Los Angeles city attorney, said the city encountered fewer enforcement problems than expected when it adopted smoking restrictions in workplaces in 1984 and the partial smoking ban for restaurants in 1987. “To date, we’ve never had to prosecute a single restaurant or workplace,” Goldstein said.

Of 1,200 complaints filed since 1985, only about 75 have involved restaurants, he said, and all were resolved by telephone contacts, letters or administrative hearings.

Officials in such cities as San Francisco, West Hollywood, Irvine, Newport Beach, Santa Barbara and Modesto said no one has been prosecuted for failure to comply with a nonsmoking ordinance.

“I have not received one complaint about smoking in a public place or restaurant,” Irvine Police Department investigator Ralph Hansen said of that city’s 5-year-old nonsmoking ordinance.

“Initially there was kind of an outcry, and a lot of restaurant owners and businesses said it wouldn’t work,” said John Poole, code enforcement manager for the city of Anaheim, which passed its nonsmoking ordinance in 1986.

“And initially we did have a number of complaints, did a lot of going out to restaurants to get them to set aside a nonsmoking area. In the last year we haven’t had more than a dozen complaints, this in a city of 250,000 people.”

The initial negative attitude changed in Newport Beach as well. Said Glen Everroad, licensing supervisor for the city: “The restaurants use our law as justification to increase nonsmoking sections from the 25% (of seating) we require to 75% or better.”

But San Francisco’s assistant director of environmental health, Jack Breslin, said he believes people don’t report the true number of violations. Starting this month, his division assigned an enforcement officer to work full time on assessing compliance around the city. “We feel . . . secondhand smoke is significant enough a public health issue,” Breslin said, “that we want to be more proactive.”