Smoked Famine? : Owners of Eateries Say Ban Would Hurt Business

Spago was crowded with Los Angeles’ culinary elite. Standing before a bank of TV cameras was chef-to-the-stars Wolfgang Puck. Scattered throughout the noisy restaurant were the proprietors of such swank eateries as Jimmy’s, Citrus, The Ivy and Toscana.

But Wednesday’s confab was not about cooking duck-sausage pizza or the art of serving cherries jubilee. It was about cigarette smoke--and how some restaurants may suffocate without it.

“All we’re going to have with that is more people on the street,” said Puck, who played host to the unusual gathering as part of the resurgent battle over whether smoking should be prohibited in every restaurant in Los Angeles. “I’m a tennis player--I’m not a smoker,” Puck told reporters and television crews. “But I really feel we have enough government telling us what to do, in the kitchen and out of the kitchen.”

Los Angeles City Councilman Mavin Braude, who failed last year to win the ban from a divided council, is scheduled to try again Tuesday in the latest showdown between smoking and anti-smoking forces. The controversial proposal--which would make Los Angeles the nation’s first major city to prohibit restaurant smoking--was endorsed by the council’s three-member Arts, Health and Humanities Committee after hours of testimony this month from doctors, tobacco industry representatives, restaurant owners and employees.

But restaurant owners, unsatisfied with the argument that secondhand cigarette smoke is a serious health threat, convened at Spago in West Hollywood to launch a media counterattack and to plan possible strategy for fighting the law.

“If we ban smoking in just one part of our (region), people are just not going to go” to dinner there, Puck said, noting that only one of his four Los Angeles-area restaurants, Eureka, would be affected by the plan. Like other proprietors, however, he called for restaurants to continue policing their own dining rooms--offering nonsmoking areas for those who want them.

“If we don’t take care of our customers,” he said, “they’re not going to come back.”

The debate centers in part on whether a ban applying only to Los Angeles would unfairly hurt restaurants there while smokers flocked to competing restaurants outside city limits. In making their objections, restaurateurs claimed they are not just blowing smoke. Five years ago, they pointed out, the city of Beverly Hills temporarily adopted a complete ban on restaurant smoking, only to see local establishments lose, in some cases, up to 30% of their trade.

The ordinance was rescinded after only four months.

But Braude noted that the city of Bellflower passed a similar ban a year ago and actually saw an upturn in restaurant revenues, based on sales-tax reports. He predicted the proposed Los Angeles law would pass--if not next week, then soon.

“We will prevail,” the councilman said. “The question of health considerations dominates everything. . . . (Secondhand) smoke is going to be declared a carcinogen by the federal government--like asbestos. To have that moving around in the air in enclosed places is just dangerous to the public health.”

Wednesday’s gathering of restaurant owners had a concerned but not combative tone. Waiters moved here and there under Spago’s beamed ceiling, serving up shrimp-and-pepper pizzas. Men in suits mingled, sipping early afternoon cocktails.

No one seemed to be lighting up, but the subject of smoke hung in the air like a thick haze.

“Restaurants are suffering already,” mused Agostino Sciandri, owner of Toscana in Brentwood, where pasta and fish entrees range from $12 to $22. If the law passed, he said, many of his patrons would be likely to seek out other eateries in Santa Monica or elsewhere. “We’re like Spago--we have a cinema clientele . . . a worldwide clientele.”

Europeans and Asians who stop in “smoke like a chimney,” Sciandri said.

Jimmy Murphy, owner of the posh Jimmy’s, let it be known that, technically, his restaurant is in Los Angeles, even though it boasts of a Beverly Hills location. The current system of smoking and nonsmoking areas seems to work, so why tinker with it, he asked.

“It’s never a problem,” Murphy said. “We’ve never lost a customer because of somebody smoking.”

Robert Bigonnet agreed. The owner of Le Chardonnay on Melrose--where the average per-person dinner bill is $45--conceded that he occasionally lights up a cigar, “but never in public.” About a fourth of his patrons do, however, and Bigonnet fears that many of them will head directly for the city line.

“Five hundred feet from me,” he said with a troubled look, “I’m going to have 10 restaurants--restaurants directly competing with me--that offer smoking.”