Picky Bureaucrats Keep Nibbling Away at Restaurateur

Santa Ana restaurant owner John Kam Yee hears the governor and President talking about small businessmen revitalizing the economy, and he can only chuckle.

Chuckle, that is, in the way that a wolf chuckles when caught in a steel trap.

Yee is caught in a trap himself--a business trap--and not one of his own making. He thinks his predator is the bureaucracy, but the foe may be more insidious than that.

Yee, an Orange County resident since 1963 and the owner of nine other restaurants, applied for a state liquor license last January for the newly remodeled Texas Cantina restaurant on East 17th Street in Santa Ana. A year and nine days later, he’s still waiting for it. Without it, he says, he’s losing money to the mournful tune of $7,000 a month because people want to drink while they eat Mexican food and ribs, and customers are staying away until they can imbibe.

So, who’s making it so tough for John Yee to make a living?

He says it’s the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, which has imposed a changing set of conditions. The most recent--and damaging--Yee says, came as late as Dec. 28 when ABC required him to have a security guard on the premises for the four hours each evening that he’s open. The conditions in that Dec. 28 letter also stipulated that Yee cut off the sale of liquor in the restaurant at 9 p.m.

Before receiving those conditions, Yee said, he had spent about $12,000 to meet other conditions. That’s all part of the $175,000 he’s sunk into the remodeling of the restaurant since he applied for the license.

The story is a little more layered than that, however. Dale Rasmussen, ABC’s district administrator, said the conditions are the result of neighborhood and Santa Ana Police concerns.

The previous owners of the restaurant, who bought the site from Yee in 1988, lost their license after undercover agents determined that cocaine was sold on the premises in 1990, Rasmussen said. Besides that, says a resident who lives nearby, neighbors complained about loud noises and other disturbances at the restaurant.

Yee, now 60, repossessed the property and decided to reopen. Based on his lengthy track record as a restaurateur, he assumed he would have little trouble getting the license. Little did he realize how much the world had changed from when he last operated the restaurant.

Joe Pierce, chairman of the local neighborhood association, said the criminal behavior in the area around the restaurant has increased in recent years. Because of that, neighbors “are approaching this (Yee’s application) differently than they might ordinarily approach it. They’re concerned about any repetition, and while it may be unlikely that that same set of circumstances would occur, nevertheless their guard is up.”

Yee isn’t the bad guy, Pierce said.

“He’s a victim as much as we are of the situation that exists in Santa Ana,” Pierce said. “It’s unfortunate, but it’s realistic.”

Isn’t that unfair to Yee, who wasn’t responsible for past problems? “I don’t think so,” Pierce said. “From my vantage point, it’s just (a reaction to) the necessity of the times and the character of the area.”

All of which leaves Yee squarely in the trap. He can’t keep paying attorneys to represent him in his application fight. He can’t back out, given all the money he’s invested already. And he’s coming to the realization he can’t fight City Hall.

Yee said he has hopes that the 9 p.m. liquor cutoff will be dropped. That’s an unreasonable requirement, he said, especially in the summer when it’s still light at 8:30 p.m. or 9 p.m. and people are just arriving for a late dinner.

It’s the security guard condition that most upsets Yee.

“It’s not only the money (to pay the guard), it’s the image,” he said. “What will our customers think about us? When you walk into a restaurant and see a guard outside, you’re not sure what’s going on inside. They think we must have a problem in this place. Put yourself in my place. What about a tourist who doesn’t know the area well? They see a guard and think there must be something wrong here.”

Rasmussen questions that. “I never heard the argument that a security guard has a chilling effect on business,” Rasmussen said. “The purpose is to prevent problems from occurring and to discourage people from loitering and gunning their engines and creating disturbances to the surrounding neighbors.”

Yee already has agreed not to have live entertainment, which he had for years when he originally owned the restaurant. To satisfy the ABC, he has paid for landscaping and even removed an outdoor phone booth from the premises. “I’ve told them off and on that any business is based on the management. If the management is good, the business would be good. But they don’t believe me. I didn’t want to drag the issue on too long, so we just gave up.”

So, who’s there to get mad at?

The ABC? It says it’s responding to citizen and police department concerns.

The neighbors? They say they’re just trying to ward off potential problems.

Even Yee is more dazed than angry. “We always believed that government entities were trying to help people, instead of hurt them, especially in this difficult economy. All the government leaders way, way up say we want to help you, we want you to jump-start the economy. Yet the people at lower levels are indifferent, they don’t care. They don’t have any feeling for the suffering that small business people are going through.”