Can’t Sip and Smoke
Hey, you, the one with the pack of Marlboro Reds tucked in your shirt pocket. You. Put that cigarette out now!
It’s Wednesday night, you’re out for some suds, and at Father’s Office in Santa Monica, it’s no longer OK to smoke and sip. Ever since Tobacco Independence Day (also known as July 4), patrons at this neighborhood-pub-cum-trendy-beer-bar have been politely asked to leave their butts at home one day a week.
Stronger anti-smoking legislation is in the works statewide, and even the California Restaurant Assn. is backing a ban on public puffing.
So Father’s Office owner Lou Moench is slowly easing in a smoke-free environment in the sort of place smokers view as the last bastion of personal freedom. To Moench, it goes along with the kind of boutique brew he serves.
“What’s the point of serving pure beer if you’re going to permit someone to sit there and blow arsenic and formaldehyde into the air?” he asks. “Still, in deference to some of my old-time day customers who smoke, we will not ban smoking entirely.”
A Taste of Bulgaria
And while we’re on the subject of beer, two Bulgarian brewskies have recently made their way into the Southern California market.
Both beers are being imported by Alexander Kraychev, a former Bulgarian Olympic silver medalist in weight lifting who defected in 1978 and went on to become a Long Beach auto mechanic and California real estate investor. He now imports about 140,000 cases a month to California.
Astika is described as a “robust, all-malt beer”; Zagorka is “a light, premium beer similar to fine German pilsners.” Both carry what some may consider a heavyweight price: $3.14 for a two-pack; $4.65 for a four-pack.
Even Garbage Isn’t Safe
All this beer, of course, comes in recyclable bottles. And California’s “bottle tax” appears to be giving rise to a new underworld type: the refuse robber.
In Santa Monica, which has offered curbside recycling since 1982, fly-by-nighters often have the dirtiest part of their work--sorting garbage--done for them. Well-meaning participants often ignore the city’s advice not to put out recyclables until the scheduled day of pickup, giving moonlighters easy access to treasure guaranteed not by fickle market forces but by the California Legislature.
Santa Monica has a law against garbage stealing, said Jon Root, marketing specialist for the city’s recycling agency.
Although stealing trash to recycle may strike some as less than a serious crime, the “cream-skimmers” actually make recycling more costly.
In Santa Monica, Root said, the city earned $112,000 last year from selling bottles, cans and papers and saved $82,000 more that it would otherwise have paid to bury the stuff. But the program still cost the city $567,000--leaving $373,000 in red ink.
