There were plenty of nonsmoking restaurants in this city before the ban: Hugo's, Treebeards, Prego and Paulie's, to name a few. The owners of these places made the decision to not allow smoking, just like other owners chose to let people light up. Now the decision's been made for all of them.
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Francisco Rangel Hernandez is his name, but everyone calls him Frank. He's been waiting tables at Michelangelo's for 15 years, and people often wait an hour and a half to sit in his section, just inside the wooden door, right behind the piano player, not far from the tree growing right through the middle of this upscale Italian restaurant on Westheimer.
Part of it's got to do with Frank's charm: He's the kind of guy who can flirt with someone's wife and end up pleasing both parties. (The wife is flattered by the attention, the husband by having such an attractive mate.) But the main reason people line up and wait to be waited on by Frank is that his section is where they can smoke.
"Smokers are my best customers," says the 57-year-old nonsmoker, perched over a white tablecloth with Sinatra playing in the background. Over the years, Frank has lit more butts than a porn director, and when a customer runs out of smokes, he'll send a busboy across the street to pick up a pack.
Smokers rarely get impatient, while "most nonsmokers say, 'Where's my food?' " he says, drumming his fingers for effect. And smokers often order expensive wines and hang around to drink them, while nonsmokers chug down their iced teas and hit the road.
Frank makes up to $200 a night manning the smoking section, although that'll all end come September, when the ban goes into effect. Michelangelo's smoking customers, a.k.a. Frank's livelihood, will be booted outside to the patio.
It's a decent patio, to be sure, but "they like the inside of Michelangelo's, the romance, the ambience," he says. Once the smoking ban takes effect, Frank thinks, many of his regulars won't come as often or stay as long as they do now. And that's going to hurt Frank's wallet.
The countless antismokers who spoke in front of City Council iterated time and time again that a smoking ban wouldn't affect business. (Who knew they were such experts in economics?) But there's a different story in Dallas, where a ban was enacted in March 2003.
Two University of North Texas economists studied the effects of the smoking ban in restaurants, and the results were released in October 2004: Dallas lost $11.8 million (or 3.6 percent) in alcoholic beverage sales in 2003 compared with 2002. You could blame it on a sliding economy, but business was booming in the smoke-friendly suburbs, where hooch sales increased from 3.2 percent (Richardson) to 7.9 percent (Plano) to 12.2 percent (Frisco). The only other city showing a loss was Irving, down 0.8 percent.
The study also claims four longtime Dallas restaurants were forced to close on account of the ban.
So a large Texas city bans smoking in restaurants and loses a bunch of revenue because a lot of the smokers choose to dine in the suburbs?
"If I'm going to pay money somewhere, I'll be damned if I don't smoke," says Lisa Line.
A few paydays ago, she and her husband went to a classy seafood restaurant on Westheimer. Their daughter was at the baby-sitter's, so they were looking for a nice quiet dinner, a rare treat. They sat down, ordered their drinks and asked for an ashtray. When they were told it was a nonsmoking place, they got up and left, driving down the street to another restaurant, where they could smoke.
They say they'll hop on the freeway and take their business to the burbs once the ban takes effect. "We will drive," says Lisa. "We will definitely drive."
Any attempt to curtail smoking in bars and restaurants is an attempt to curtail smoking in general. The less people can smoke, the logic goes, the less they will. But is that such a good thing?
In 2003, Texas smokers paid 41 cents a pack in excise taxes, totaling more than $501 million. They paid more than $271 million in sales tax on cigarettes and another $479 million in extra costs due to tobacco settlements, which goes straight to the state. The grand total: more than $1.25 billion a year.
That's a lot of money for roads, schools and hospitals.
Doctoring the Numbers
Most antismokers just think smoking is icky, and they will do anything they can to eradicate it from the city, even if that means making populist appeals about the rights of restaurant workers. Yeah, all those people who got up and spoke in front of City Council really care about how restaurants workers are being forced to inhale secondhand smoke. It had nothing to do with their personal preferences; it was all about the workers. Yeah, right.
How come they didn't bother to ask Frank at Michelangelo's what he thought?
Anyway, restaurants have ventilation systems. "Cooking, especially over open flames, produces lots of smoke, yet customers do not smell it and workers do not suffer," thanks to ventilation systems, writes Russell Ybarra, president of the Greater Houston Restaurant Association, in an e-mail to the Houston Press. (The GHRA supported the restaurant ban out of political expediency, although it was very much against a stronger ban.)
