Border Dispute : Jagged Boundaries Make Crazy Quilt of Restaurants That Ban or Welcome Smokers

If only it had feet, the Barefoot Cafe might be inclined to take a hike. The trendy 3rd Street eatery occupies a narrow peninsula of land in a city--Los Angeles--that soon may ban smoking in restaurants.

Scarcely a butt’s throw away, in surrounding Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, the after-dinner cigarette still burns brightly.

“Whichever way you go, you’re out of L.A. pretty quickly,” said Barefoot bar manager Tom Hale, who fears that customers who smoke may soon figure that out--and disappear, perhaps, like so much nicotine in the wind after the Los Angeles City Council adopted a controversial anti-smoking ordinance Wednesday.

The law, which would take effect a month after Mayor Tom Bradley signs it, calls for a citywide ban on smoking in restaurants because of concerns over the health threat caused by so-called secondhand cigarette smoke.

“It can’t help us,” Hale said of the law, noting that smokers abound in Barefoot’s clientele of Hollywood stars, producers and physicians from nearby Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “If someone really wants to go someplace to smoke, (they’re) going to have the option to go (elsewhere) pretty easily.”

In this corner of the metropolis, a jigsaw arrangement of municipal boundaries creates miles of uncertainty about where, or whether, the smoker will be able to light up. Streets such as Sunset and La Cienega boulevards, Doheny Drive and Melrose Avenue all pass from busy nonsmoking blocks into equally crowded stretches where smoking still would be legal and, in many cases, welcomed.

On Sunset in West Hollywood, where many cafes offer indoor and outdoor seating, Clafoutis Restaurant figures to see a windfall if smokers from Los Angeles decide to seek a haven by crossing the nearby border. According to owner Daniel Benhamou, smokers account for about 80% of the patronage, but he expressed mixed emotions that the number might climb.

“I’m not a smoker--I can’t sit next to someone who’s smoking,” he said. “But I’m trying to satisfy the demand.”

Waitress Dina Asturi added with a shrug: “Smokers who want to go out to eat, they’re going to go where they have to go.”

The smokers who filled table after table there Wednesday voiced an embattled attitude toward the law. “I (will) come here and not go there,” Eric Sabban, 30, said of Los Angeles, where he spends half the year exporting jeans to his native France. “Everyone has a right to smoke if he wants . . . if it’s not in someone’s face. This is my life. If I want to die, I’ll die.”

Other patrons questioned why the city would bother with a crackdown on smoking when drugs and shootings are rampant in the streets.

“Frankly, I find all the carrying on about it slightly ridiculous,” said one West Hollywood resident, 54, who declined to be identified because he works for converts to the anti-smoking movement. “They’re all jumping on what I call the Jungian mass consciousness of nonsmoking. . . . It’s like a witch hunt.”

Among the nonsmokers, however, the ordinance was greeted like the proverbial breath of fresh air.

Artist Adam Sherman, 38, who claims credit for some of the abstract art at the Barefoot Cafe, talked of the time he reached over and, with his bare hands, crushed out the cigarette of an obtrusive nearby smoker.

Tony Segall, 38, a Glendale attorney, expressed similar sentiments. Smoking? “My mother died from it,” he said pointedly. “I think the whole tobacco industry should be banned, frankly. I can smell it from across the room. It’s a social plague.”