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Clear the Air
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That sounds fine to Sambonn Lek, head bartender at the Town & Country Lounge in the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue NW. The clubby leather-and-dark-wood joint used to be so thick with cigar smoke "you could hardly see my face," he says.
Business dropped off at first but has evened out, and Lek says he loves not having to deal with those late-night stragglers who always wanted to stay for hours after the bar closed, just "finishing their cigars."
But that was the whole point for Bill Kaffka. Well, not the late-night part, but the smoking part
"Taking away my piano player, then my cigarettes," fumes Kaffka, whose tweed jacket/blue sweater vest ensemble is completed with a lapel pin honoring his 30 years of federal service. But, he adds, "maybe if they brought Danny back, I wouldn't mind so much about the cigarettes."
But for every Kaffka who grumbles, there's a Nicole Barber who saunters in, sits and gloats. Not to Town & Country necessarily, but to the Tune Inn on Capitol Hill, a spot she almost certainly would not have enjoyed pre-ban.
Barber, a Fairfax teacher and soccer coach, is the type to become incensed if someone lights up at a table next to her -- "I will move, and I will vocally move. I will let those people know I'm moving because of them," she says. "I just feel very passionately about not being a victim of someone else's choice."
So she has started going out in the District more often now, including to places such as the Tune Inn, where curls of smoke were once as much a part of the character of the storied pub as the animal heads lining its walls.
But anyway, folks are adjusting.
Here, let Tune Inn bartender Ned Kraemer explain it: "My girlfriend says my old clothes used to smell like smoke and grease. Now they just smell like grease."
THE RAVEN GRILL 3125 Mount Pleasant Ave. NW; 202-387-9274.
JR'S BAR & GRILL 1519 17th St. NW; 202-328-0090.
THE FOX & HOUNDS 1537 17th St. NW; 202-232-6307.
TOWN & COUNTRY LOUNGE 1127 Connecticut Ave. NW; 202-347-3000.
MY BROTHER'S PLACE 237 Second St. NW; 202-347-1350.
TUNE INN 331 1/2 Pennsylvania Ave. SE; 202-543-2725.
Ellen McCarthy is a Weekend staff writer. Her e-mail address is mccarthye@washpost.com.
