Bar, Restaurant Group Discusses Ways to Halt Excessive Drinking

In a banquet room in Seaport Village, overlooking the Embarcadero Marina and San Diego Bay, 25 representatives from some of the city’s largest alcohol-serving restaurants, hotels and taverns met Tuesday without having a drink.

On the contrary, the group had assembled to exchange ideas among themselves and with officials from state alcohol-licensing and control agencies to reduce drunkenness at county bars and restaurants.

The Responsible Hospitality Council of San Diego County, the group of restaurant and bar owners that hosted the meeting, unveiled its “decal identification program” to the group, which promotes a 12-hour education course for hospitality industry managers and a six-hour course for alcohol beverage servers.

A decal placed on the front window of bars and restaurants throughout the county will identify restaurants and nightclubs as responsible alcohol-serving establishments that adhere to the council’s ground rules and attends its courses.

Those rules include discontinuing all-you-can-drink and multiple-drink promotions; establishing a written policy to discourage the intoxication of customers and maintaining a staff at least half of whom have attended the servers course, said Paul McIntyre, executive director of the county chapter of the California Restaurant Assn.

“It’s the public that’s been changing, and we as an industry have to make sure we keep in step with them,” McIntyre said.

On Monday, the San Diego City Council unanimously approved a permanent alcohol ban at one city beach and two parks, and a one-year trial ban at most city parks and all city beaches.

Jerry Jolly, district administrator of the state’s Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, said the state is willing to provide incentives to restaurant owners whose employees attend these courses by considering reductions in penalties for first-time offenses such as serving alcohol to minors.

Although refusing to serve alcohol to an already inebriated customer or recommending that drinkers consume food to slow down the speed with which alcohol enters the blood system might seem like bad business for a bar, serving a drunk could be worse, said Jim Peters, founder of the Responsible Hospitality Institute

“One bad customer can ruin a lot more business than a whole bunch of good ones,” Peters said.

As for the group’s beverage, a plan to serve non-alcoholic wine fell through, McIntyre said. The restaurant and hotel managers sipped water or iced tea.