Smoking Ban, Tax Bill Giving Some Restaurateurs Indigestion

It was a bad week for Los Angeles restaurants. With the long-debated city smoking ban taking effect, restaurant owners were bombarded with complaints from angry customers. On top of that, the passage of President Clinton’s budget reduced the deductibility of business meals from 80% to 50% and could severely depress expense-account trade for restaurants, already hurt by the lingering recession.

“It’s very scary,” says Ron Salisbury, owner of El Cholo, the Original Sonora Cafe and two other Los Angeles-area restaurants. “I’ve had conversations with friends who own really good restaurants and they are starting to talk about bankruptcy. There’s nothing that looms in the immediate future that is going to pick up us.”

“I didn’t set my restaurant up to be a place where people come to have meals written off,” says Mario Martinoli, chef-owner of Mario’s Cooking for Friends. Still, the Italian restaurant-deli is surrounded by Paramount and CBS studio expense-account execs. “I don’t think people are going to stop coming because they can only deduct 50% of their meal.”

Martinoli didn’t wait around for the city to outlaw smoking either. He banned it in his dining room two years ago. But the 30-seat outside terrace is still jammed with smokers every night. And Martinoli is going to close his restaurant for a night next month to hold a cigar dinner. “As a restaurateur, you should be entitled to market your location the way you want to,” he says. “The customer has the ability to choose whether or not they want to eat there.” Besides, he adds, “how are you going to police it? Call 911? Or maybe they’ll create a mod smoking squad to make the bust?”

“Smoking isn’t even an issue here,” says Bruce Marder about his Venice West Beach Cafe. “If anyone were to light up, my customers would police them.”

At the French bistro Cafe Maurice, smoking is still very much an issue. Several of the restaurant’s French-speaking customers walked out when they were told they couldn’t light up. Still, the busy restaurant has no plans to enlarge its eight-table outdoor patio for its heavy smoking clientele. “Sure, it’s made people angry,” Cafe Maurice’s Eric (he uses just his first name) says nonchalantly, “but I just tell them to get out.”

“Can I make my bar/lounge area upstairs a smoking section? Can I smoke in my own restaurant?” These are questions Mauro Vicente, who gets a lot of Italian and Japanese customers--heavy smokers--at his luxurious two-story Rex Il Ristorante, asked the city clerk’s office. In the meantime, until he gets a definite answer, Vicente plans to go with what seems logical to him. “I understand that smoke would bother people if we lived on an ecological island where everything is purified,” Vicente says, “but has anybody looked at the Los Angeles sky lately? Some days you can actually taste the smog.

After hanging on by a thread for years, Norm Langer’s prayers were answered when the Metro Rail Red Line started running past his 7th and Alvarado deli. All of a sudden the best pastrami in town was merely two subway stops away from downtown. Now Langer says business is down again because of the smoking ban. “People who would stop by in the morning for a cup of coffee, a bagel and a leisurely smoke,” explains Langer, “will now drive to Culver City or Beverly Hills.”

“Why is it legal to smoke two miles away and not here?” asks Citrus manager Robert Faure. “It’s not part of the dining experience to leave your table to go out to smoke.”

While only about 10% of Citrus customers smoke, a majority of the upscale French restaurant’s business comes from expense accounts. “I’m normally an optimistic guy,” says Faure, “but let’s be realistic, things are going to be extremely difficult.”

BAD NEWS BEARER: Akira Hirose, who left the Belvedere at the Peninsula Beverly Hills to cook at Raphael Wizman’s still-unopened French-Japanese Bardot, has been fired. “I did a tasting and (Wizman) didn’t like it,” says Hirose. “The owner told me he didn’t like Japanese food. He now wants a pure French restaurant.”

After the tasting, Hirose asked Wizman, a former hairdresser and clothing manufacturer, what kind of food he had in mind. Wizman said he liked Andreas, the Continental-Swiss restaurant. “I went to dinner there,” says Hirose. “It was the food I cooked 15 years ago.”

Wizman has now hired Jean-Claude Seruja, who cooked at the French-Russian Diaghilev at the Bel Age Hotel, to replace Hirose, now executive chef at the Tower in downtown Los Angeles.