Smoking rules go over smoothly for most area restaurants

Mary Jane’s Café has had a non-smoking section for a year, but that hasn’t changed much.

Nonsmokers still sit at the bar and the smoke-free room stays empty unless the smoking section fills up, said owner Mary Jane Abbott.

When the Greyhound bus stops at Kemper Street Station in the afternoon, some of the riders step into Mary Jane’s to chow down and light up. “They say, ‘Oh good, we can smoke in here.’ Wherever they’re from, they can’t smoke in bars,” Abbott said.

One year after Virginia’s restaurant smoking regulations took effect, Lynchburg-area restaurant owners, health inspectors and law enforcement officials said the transition was smooth.

The law required restaurants to either ban indoor smoking or confine smoking to an enclosed section vented separately from the nonsmoking area.

Of 781 eateries in the region, 22 now have indoor smoking sections that meet the law’s requirements. Another 44 allow smoking outside, said Steve Simpson, environmental health manager for Central Virginia Health District.

Health department records before the smoking ban took effect showed about 70 restaurants with indoor smoking.

The health department has received only three complaints regarding restaurant smoking, Simpson said. Two of those turned out to be invalid complaints.

The third showed that the door separating the smoking and smoke-free sections did not close quickly enough at one restaurant. Simpson said the restaurant fixed the problem.

Lynchburg Police Department statistician Bill Tomlin said the department has not written any $25 citations for eateries or individuals violating the smoking regulations, nor has it logged any complaints of violations.

Restaurants reported that the smoking ban did not impact business as much as they had expected.

“We’re having a lousy year, but it doesn’t have anything to do with (the smoking ban),” said Wells Duffy, owner of The Cavalier on Rivermont Avenue.

He said sales are slow because of city sewer and road projects near the restaurant.

When the smoking ban took effect, Duffy expected to lose lots of customers who preferred to smoke with meals. However, “we all came to the agreement that most people would adapt,” he said.

“We’ve only lost one customer because of the smoking (ban). She just got mad and refused to come back.”

Duffy said The Cavalier did not seem to lose traffic to bars and restaurants that walled off smoking sections.

Milano’s on Boonsboro Road enclosed its bar to create a smoking section, but it went smoke-free after a few weeks.

“Even though we had separate ventilations, once we closed it off completely, it was just too smoky,” said Milano’s employee Michelle Simmons. “Even the smokers complained.”

Mary Jane’s Café spent about $4,000 to create a nonsmoking section and cut a new entrance to it. Abbott later found out that the law does not require bathrooms to be in the nonsmoking area, so she could have made a smaller smoke-free zone.

“I could have blocked off a booth back there for two people, and it would have been okay,” she said.

That’s essentially what some diners did. The Stadium Inn on Fort Avenue created a tiny nonsmoking section, about 5 feet long and wide.

The smoke-free room seldom sees customers. On Thursday, a waitress wiped a layer of dust from the single, rarely used table to seat a customer.

The tavern’s owner would not comment for this story.

“If you had four real friendly people, you could get them all in there,” the health department’s Simpson said of the Stadium Inn’s non-smoking section. “But, they meet the requirements.”