Bars Still Exhibit Plenty of Puffing--and Huffing

From Rudy’s Pub in Palo Alto, where Christmas lights shine year-round, to The Saloon, an old-time bikers’ bar in Palm Springs, to Ronnie’s Dew Drop Inn, a neighborhood tavern in Chula Vista, bar owners or their customers around California are flouting the state’s ban on smoking and daring authorities to come in and kick their ashes.

Even as many bar owners in California are successfully--albeit begrudgingly--asking their customers to abide by the month-old law, there are enough rebels within the ranks to suggest that enforcement of the ban is hit-or-miss at best, chaotic at worse. Adding to the confusion this week was the passage late Wednesday night of an Assembly measure to repeal the ban next January--subject to the state Senate’s unlikely concurrence.

“We’re smokin’,” boasted bartender Meridith Brown at Rudy’s, not far from Stanford University. “I don’t want to sound too cocky, but we believe we should be allowed to have smoking in our bars.”

Never mind the $100 citation the bar already has been hit with. “Our customers want to smoke,” she declared.

Tom Adamo, who owns The Saloon, posted the requisite no-smoking signs inside his place--along with a huge banner reading “Freedom of Choice Smokers Club.”

“I’m willing to pay a fine,” said Adamo, himself a nonsmoker. “What are the authorities going to do? If they want, I’ll just give them my license . . . and become a private club.”

In Chula Vista, a bartender--refusing to give her last name--said smokers have continued to light up inside Ronnie’s. “We don’t have ashtrays sitting out,” she said. “We do a lot of floor sweeping.”

On the other hand, the ban has been rigorously enforced at bars including Scoby’s in Chatsworth.

“We have not been smoking,” said General Manager Valerie Farlow-Johnson. “We have lots of smokers here, but the bottom line is that they’re also adults, and they understand that a law is a law is a law. They’re not totally thrilled about it, but the place smells a lot better now.”

Farlow-Johnson said she and her staff politely ask smokers to take their cigarettes outside to the patio, where tables and ashtrays have been provided. If they don’t comply, “I just take the cigarettes,” she said.

Indeed, the question of whether smoking occurs in bars--despite the threat of fines that can reach into the hundreds of dollars--seems to depend on the resolve of bartenders to play the heavy.

At Bar 99, a small beer-and-wine bar in Los Molinas, 100 miles north of Sacramento, owner Ken Northup said he isn’t about to stand between some big farmer and his Winston.

“I tell ‘em, ‘No smoking,’ and they just laugh at me,” Northup said. “Some big guys come in here, and who am I to tell them they can’t smoke? I’m not the law. I just put the signs up.”

Howard Queen, who owns the San Andres Fault in Santa Barbara, concurs. He already has received a warning from local authorities after one customer complained about another’s smoke. He said he tries to monitor the problem, but only to a point.

“People don’t come into a bar for their health,” he said. “If people are going to smoke, it’s not in my job title to police them. I’ll tell them they can’t smoke, but if they say bull . . . I say fine.”

The job of enforcing the smoking ban rests with cities and counties, once complaints are received. Some complaints are passed on to sheriff’s deputies or police officers, others to health or building code inspectors.

In Los Angeles County, about 200 complaints have so far been filed, out of about 3,200 establishments that have bars, officials say. But so far, none of the complaints have led to actual citations, only warnings.

In Clovis, Police Sgt. Robert Keyes oversees the enforcement and says he expects to issue fines within days to bars that have been warned but still refuse to comply.

At one bar where he gave an initial warning, “they put a jar up on the bar to ask for donations to pay the fine.” Nobody put out their cigarettes. “They viewed it as their constitutional right to smoke. I never envisioned myself being the smoking police, but I am.”

Even the bureaucracy seems confused by the young law. When a staff person in the Orange County health department was asked who enforces the law, the call was referred to the Sheriff’s Department; a call to the Sheriff’s Department was referred back to the health department.

Some bar patrons reacted prematurely Thursday to news of the Assembly’s vote on the smoking ban. The fact that the bill also needs approval from the state Senate--where it faces an uphill battle--seemed lost on puffing patrons perched on stools at Sans Souci in downtown Ventura.

“We were smoking outside before today, but now the Assembly has passed the bill so starting today, it’s OK,” said customer Carol Duarte.

Others are violating the law knowingly, but with no fanfare. A cocktail lounge owner in Riverside--who didn’t want to invite attention by being identified--said: “If you don’t wanna be around smoke, just don’t come in here. All I ask is, keep your ashes off the carpet.” Ashtrays line the bar, and the bartender warns patrons of the smoking ban--even as he pulls out a match to light a customer’s cigarette.

“I’d rather get the tips than be protected from cancer,” he said. “More people die from booze than smoking.”

There is legal smoking in some taverns, such as O’Keeffe’s Bar, a 15-stool hole-in-the-wall in San Francisco. Because the law was written to protect employees, owner Annie O’Keeffe allows smoking--because she employs no one.

And because her competition has had to clean up its air, she says her business is up 50%.

A Riverside eatery, Art’s Bar and Grill, tried to look the other way when the ban became law and didn’t fume when customers lighted up, but finally caved in and now enforces it.

Initially, customers in the bar could simply walk over to a closet and pick up an ashtray, said manager Paula Conti Jones. But fear of being cited caused her to clamp down. It took its toll, she said: On Taco Tuesdays, she’d normally sell 100 of them at the bar; last week, she sold only 13.

“What makes me mad,” she said, “is that my customers are going to bars where they can still smoke.”

At San Diego’s oldest bar--the Waterfront, where Wyatt Earp once sipped--what bothers manager Marty Merritt about the smoking ban is the loss of something even more ethereal than smoke.

“You know how, at a neighborhood bar, people start talking, start joking, and they get on a roll, like a wave? Now, every few minutes, people are going outside for a smoke. The customers aren’t feeding off each other, having a good time. Guys are there for only half a joke, then they take off.”

Contributing to this article were Times staff writers Maria La Ganga in San Francisco, James Ricci in the San Fernando Valley and David Haldane in Orange County, and correspondents Michael Krikorian in Los Angeles, Julia Scheeres in Santa Monica and Brenda Loree in Ventura.