Clear the Air

By Ellen McCarthy
Friday, April 20, 2007

Let's talk, for a moment, about the smoky bar.

The haze and the mystery. The aura of excess and abandon. The toxins. The defiant indulgence in toxins.

Let's talk about how for so long the bar just was a smoky bar.

It was fat men and fat cigars and wood-trimmed backrooms with $12 glasses of merlot-cab blends where Chris Buckley and his lobbyists sat and thanked us for smoking.

It was passing an ashtray and huddling into high-backed booths, or low-slung lounge chairs, watching the 23-year-old across the room tilt her head back with a long exhale, aiming for some shade of Jessica Rabbit sophistication.

It was the "Excuse me, but do you have an extra cigarette?" way of saying, "Oooh, you're kind of cute, and this is the most low-risk way I can think of to start a conversation without mortifying myself."

It was the old lady bartender who probably wasn't all that old but had a voice like a garbage disposal and would leave the cig in her mouth while mixing three drinks, popping four bottle caps and lecturing you on how "you gotta toss that sorry cheater before he ups and ruins your whole damn life."

It was the smell, which ceased to smell until you left the bar, at which point it became a stench. And stayed a stench until the wash, except for those times when -- for one reason or another -- you failed to end up in your own bed at the end of the night. Then it became a putrid scarlet letter you wore all the way home, convinced the whole while that it was being used by everyone who crossed your path as the sole basis on which to judge your essential human worth.

Here, let's listen to Oscar Wilde on the subject:

"A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?"

And now the surgeon general:

"Seriously? Do we have to go over this again? What don't you understand about the word 'deathtrap'?"

Right. Point taken. Especially by the governing bodies in Maryland and the District. (It's still "smoke 'em if you got 'em" in the commonwealth, of course.)

It has been more than three months since a bar stopped being a smoky bar in the District (well, for the most part anyway -- see Page 29). So we dropped by what used to be some of the smokiest addresses in the city to find out what has been lost and gained and maybe indelibly altered. To see what remains in the absence of haze.

***

"A bar is a temple of oral fixation, and they have taken the cardboard nipple away," Phil Duarte proclaims. He is a painter and a musician and a three-decade on-again, off-again smoker who is off again at the moment but is livid nonetheless.

"If I thought the state was really trying to protect my health, I might feel differently," he adds from his regular spot in the front booth at the Raven Grill, where the neon "Cocktails" sign glows just above his head.

Duarte is a pontificator with an 11 o'clock shadow, whose big hands remain folded across his belly as he expounds on the power of market forces, the underrated Marion Barry era and a Dead Kennedys song that has the Suede Denim Secret Police coming "for your uncool niece."

"I prefer the old, grungy D.C. to the new, whitewashed D.C., and the smoking ban goes along with that," Duarte says.

"But the point is, if you're not a smoker, you're smoking every time you come in here," Ron Morreale butts in from the other side of the booth. Morreale -- who likes to think of the Mount Pleasant dive as a "book with all characters and no plot" -- is the type to talk with his hands, one of which is holding an unlit cigarette at the moment. "Smoking is the only vice I know of where you share your disease with someone who isn't partaking. I like the ban. I really do.

"This makes me want to go smoke," Morreale says, pulling up his pants and ducking out of the place that's not his favorite bar, but his "only bar."

But wait, there's more. "I like bar people in my bar. I don't like yuppies," Duarte says. It seems the recession of the nicotine cloud that used to be a fixture at the Raven has brought some newcomers in to partake of the jukebox and $2.50 Miller Lites. "I think," he adds, "I am becoming a curmudgeon."

"I've lost 20 pounds," Keith Semmes says on a Friday afternoon from the patio of JR's Bar & Grill on 17th Street near Dupont Circle. The real estate professional used to go to bars -- this one in particular -- five nights a week. He would drink, eat a burger, talk. Now he goes out once a week, choosing instead to go home, microwave something and smoke in his own apartment.

"The bartenders even call me and ask where I am," he says. "But I've saved a fortune not coming out there and spending all this money."

And: "I have more time to date now."

But if JR's has lost the high-frequency loyalty of Semmes and the like, the bar has made up for it with a new -- or maybe old -- breed of customer.

"We're seeing customers we haven't seen in a while," Abbas Alwazir says. "They've been coming back, and they walk in and say, 'Oh, my God. I haven't been in here for two, three, four years.' They'd liked the atmosphere, but they didn't come because it was smoky."

Alwazir, who has worked behind the bar at JR's for two years, was opposed to the ban. For 11 years, he'd been a pack-a-day smoker, and it seemed a pain to have to take a break and go outside for a cig.

"I didn't want the change, and customer-wise I thought we'd take a hit," Alwazir says. Now, 3 1/2 months later, he has cut down to half a pack and has changed his mind about the ban. It's economics. "When I started counting out my tips, they were the same, maybe even a little higher."

Which might make Brian Jones want to start looking for a new gig. He has been bartending down the street at the Fox & Hounds for nine years, and he's loyal to the place, but loyalty hasn't been very lucrative of late: He says his tips have dropped off by half since January.

And it's not even that there are fewer people in the bar -- it's just that they're different people.

"The old clientele would come in and stay for the night. The new clientele doesn't stay as long; they definitely don't tip as much. They come in and have one or two glasses of wine before dinner," Jones says, balancing four glasses and a couple of plates at happy hour in the neighborhood bar. "One of our regulars would be worth five of these new customers."

That is not to say he doesn't appreciate the patronage of folks like Vivian Acosta, who is sitting outside with two friends, with a glass of wine and goose bumps on her legs. Acosta is a social smoker who has mixed feelings about the ban. On one hand, it has been kind of a drag to go outside and freeze every time she wants a cigarette, but on the other, it has made her cut down, which is good, and has actually opened up some new imbibing options for her group.

"There were bars that I definitely wouldn't go to before, because they were so smoky. And now I'll go there," agrees Acosta's friend Kristy Bible, who only worries that alfresco eating will be ruined this spring because smokers will be monopolizing outdoor patios all over town.

That's just fine with Marc Eber at My Brother's Place, tucked off Constitution Avenue NW just before the Capitol. Better the puffers go anywhere else than this bar, which "always smells like beer," but at least doesn't smell like day-old ash and beer anymore. Last winter, Eber, who has been bartending there for 2 1/2 years, got bronchitis three times. Once it turned into pneumonia. This year he has barely had a cold, and it doesn't seem like the ban has stopped anyone from coming in for the bar's $15 "all you can drink" special on Saturday nights.

"People can just step outside," he says flatly. "It's a social thing, too, because all the smokers can band together and talk about how much they hate the smoking ban, maybe."

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.