The smoke goes on in some area restaurants that have separately ventilated smoking areas. That is, if the section meets the three conditions. First, a smoking area can’t represent a portion of the restaurant that is so large as to eclipse “reasonable” nonsmoking areas. Second, smoking rooms are to be separate “to the extent reasonably practicable” from nonsmoking areas and the general public’s entranceways. And finally, it suggests that the two above rules shouldn’t be cause for restaurants to physically alter their restaurants to create smoking sections.
The key word, of course, is “suggests.” At the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, the smoking ban threatened to put the kibosh on hookah sales. Gabriel Allan, who works at the Downtown Mall establishment, says he did minor physical renovations to the restaurant’s back room at the behest of owner Gwendolyn Hall so that they could continue selling the flavored tobacco. “We decided to enclose the back room with doors and install a small ventilation system,” Allan says. On the doors, a not unattractive sign reads, “You must be 18 to enter.”
But the Tea Bazaar’s smoking room is hookahs only—sorry, cigarette smokers. That’s why there is, as there always has been, Miller’s. The front door at the musty Downtown bar displays a printout of the universal “No Smoking” sign, as required by law in all restaurants. Miller’s has designated its first two floors, the restaurant area, as a nonsmoking zone. But when 6pm rolls around the bar’s third floor, which boasts both a separate entrance and ventilation system, allows you to smoke ’em if you got ’em.
For places like the Tea Bazaar, minor renovations were a no-brainer. (Allan, who is also a carpenter, says, “We did the work in-house, and I’m pretty cheap.”) But at C&O, smoking is no longer allowed in both the uptight upstairs dining area, as well as in the freewheeling bar area, which has its own entrance but no separate ventilation system. And as for 2 Sides in Belmont—that’s half sports bar, half restaurant—smoking is banned on both sides. Restaurants like McGrady’s, where before the ban smoking was allowed everywhere, and Michael’s Bistro, where smoking was allowed only in the bar area until after dining hours, there is no option but to enforce the ban throughout the restaurant, at all times.
One month out, Charlottesville’s separate smoking rooms—including the ones up the dark stairway at Miller’s, and behind closed doors at the Tea Bazaar—feel like a throwback to Prohibition-era America, when respectable people forayed into the margins for the love, or the need, of a substance. One almost expects to open smoking room doors to find rheumy-eyed addicts hunched and hacking, or something like the cantina scene from Star Wars. In fact, the smoke remains an afterthought in separately ventilated areas; what remains is the sense that just by being there you’re doing something sinful. That’s as separate a room as there is.
But smoke in a nonsmoking area and you’re looking at a civil penalty of…no more than $25. It doesn’t sound like much, but at five bucks a pack, that’s almost 100 smokes. Depending on your brand.
