Steakhouse Owner Says Smoking Ban Just Hot Air

The 51-year-old owner of Minero's Steakhouse in the Palms district of Los Angeles was recovering from open-heart surgery and didn't want to breathe secondhand smoke.

But what's killing Minero these days is feeling as though he's the last honest man.

The problem, he says, is that he's losing substantial business for following a law that is being widely disobeyed and receiving minimal enforcement.

Most tavern owners who are grumbling publicly about the smoking ban hate the fact that cigarettes and cigars have been legally prohibited in bars since Jan. 1.

Minero, on the other hand, wishes authorities would put some teeth into the law.

"I believe that if they enforce the law and people don't have the option to go where there's smoking, business will level out," he said. But the way things stand, Minero feels more like a proprietor who refused to serve liquor during Prohibition. "The speak-easies became very popular," he noted.

A study by a national beverage institute last week found that one-fourth of California's bars were still allowing smokers to light up in violation of the new law, which is designed to protect employees from secondhand smoke. Enforcement efforts--left up to each city and county--have been largely passive.

During a recent afternoon happy hour, Minero winced as he looked around his steak joint with its red leather-esque menus and dark faux-wood tables and saw only a single bar customer.

This was not how he imagined things working out.

When he opened the restaurant in November, Minero thought he was about to take advantage of a rising anti-smoking tide. California had banned smoking in restaurants in 1995 but kept extending the deadline for bar owners until this year.

Before his most recent venture, Minero owned a bar and grill near Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade. He said he accepted the haze of smoke that often hung in the bar air as befitting a casual joint near the beach.

Minero had been a smoker off and on, to say nothing of spending substantial time in smoky confines. But when doctors diagnosed hardening of the arteries and suggested he might have suffered a minor heart attack, he was ready to call it quits with the restaurant business.

The option of opening a nonsmoking restaurant seemed unrealistic.