A few Northern Virginia bars are exempt from smoking ban

It's happy hour at Whitlow's on Wilson on a Thursday night. Customers in the island-inspired Sand Bar shoot pool, laughing and joking while they sip beer from oversize plastic mugs. A good number of them are smoking, and the scent of tobacco wafts through the room.

Wait. Didn't a statewide ban on smoking in bars and restaurants go into effect on Dec. 1? Shouldn't smokers be spending the winter outside, huddled around portable heaters? Shouldn't the Arlington County health department be in here handing out $25 fines?

Not exactly.

Thanks to an exemption, some bars are still able to welcome smokers in from the cold. An establishment can allow smoking indoors as long as the smoking section is completely separated from the nonsmoking section. It must be walled off and have a separate ventilation system so the smoky air isn't recirculated into clean air.

These are expensive propositions for bar owners, but a growing number are making the investment. In Herndon, the Australian-themed half of the Irish/Australian pub Ned Devine's and Ned Kelly's now serves smokers. The Crystal City Sports Pub, one of the area's largest and most popular places to watch college sports, has designated its second floor as a smoking area. Old Town Alexandria's Flying Fish restaurant has turned its downstairs Speakeasy room (home to karaoke three nights a week) into a smoking space. And the Hard Times Cafe and Cue in Springfield offers a respite for smokers with pool and TVs.

And on one three-quarter-mile stretch of Arlington's busy Wilson Boulevard between the Court House and Clarendon Metro stations, three bars have already received permission to offer smoking.

At Whitlow's, customers continue to fire up their lighters and smoke away in both the Sand Bar and its adjoining patio, which is tented and heated for the winter.

"For me, smoking and drinking go hand in hand," said Rob Alonzo, a 28-year-old government contractor who was pulling cigarettes from a shiny metal case. "If I go into a bar that doesn't allow smoking, that's not going to make me leave, but it'll make me think twice about going there again. Especially when it's like 23 degrees outside."

Whitlow's received an exemption, explains assistant general manager Nadim Kouttab, because what is now the Sand Bar was once a separate building. Whitlow's purchased it about a decade ago and knocked through the wall, but kept the original ventilation system. When the smoking bill passed, all Whitlow's had to do for an exemption was make sure that a door separated the smoking and nonsmoking sections and that the HVAC was in working order.

Last Thursday, smokers and nonsmokers mingled, sipping during happy hour.

Sam Mumm and Chanpi Oak were sitting at the bar with beers and ashtrays in front of them. "I like [the exemption] because I'm a smoker," said Mumm, a 24-year-old cook at a D.C. restaurant. "I'd rather not sit outside."

Oak, on the other hand, is not a smoker and favors the ban. "I'm at a bar, I'm having a couple of drinks and you're smoking. I don't want that," said the 26-year-old, who works with children in an after-school program. "I don't want to smell. You can go outside."