GARDEN GROVE : Coffeehouse Owners Take Dim View of Lighting, Entertainment Rules

Concerned that the city’s coffeehouses have become magnets for youth gangs, the police chief is lobbying for an ordinance that would ban anyone younger than 18 from the establishments during school hours and after 8 p.m.

Coffeehouse owners would also have to turn up the lights and get rid of all but three table-top video games in each shop.

Shop owners say that such restrictions are unnecessary and unreasonable, and that they already discourage teen-agers as customers because they disturb older patrons.

“We don’t have young people around,” said Nguyen Do, 25, a waitress at Cafe Khong Ten on Brookhurst Street. Her customers, she said, are middle-aged men, many of them Vietnamese expatriates, who stop by to unwind by playing video games and listening to music after work. “They just sit and play video games quietly,” she said. “How can anyone complain about them?”

The ordinance, patterned after a Westminster law passed in July, won preliminary approval last week and is up for a final vote today.

“Our statistics show there is a problem,” said police investigator Bill Johnson, who was involved in drafting the ordinance.

There have been 11 homicides or attempted homicides in or outside Garden Grove coffeehouses in the past three years, Johnson said. A majority of those, as well as a number of assaults, fights and other disturbances in the area, involved juveniles, he said.

Coffeehouse operators, however, say they are not aware of a crime problem and fear that the proposed ordinance would hurt their business. The video games and dim lighting, they say, are part of the atmosphere that makes the coffeehouses popular.

Tien Nguyen, who owns Cafe Eden on Euclid Avenue, said his older clientele would object to brighter lights and fewer amusements. “It’s not very restful,” he said.

Johnson said the lighting requirement would be the same as that for any business in Garden Grove.