Nonsmoking Catches on in Czech Republic

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Pavlov flirted with selling the business, but after questionnaires distributed at the restaurant and posted on its website showed most customers would support a ban, he decided to kick out the butts, effective New Year's Day. La Casa Blu's website now touts its "clean air" and urges patrons to "quit smoking with friends."

At first sales dropped dramatically, but the owner stuck to his plan. "It was very cold out, and all bars were doing terribly," he said. Putting his own savings into the business, he waited out the winter and saw customers returning in numbers by spring.

Pavlov said profits are down slightly compared with last year, which he attributes to the economic crisis rather than the smoking shift. He added that food rather than alcohol now makes up the bulk of sales.

Ales Dockal, who runs Pivovarsky Klub near Prague's main bus station, was hoping for a similar shift when he went nonsmoking on 21 March, a decision he calls "purely business."

"Smoking hurts consumption of food...and that is the meat and potatoes of our business," said Dockal, who also operates the nonsmoking brewpub Pivovarsky Dum in the city center. In addition, he and his partners believed smoking undercut the "high-class beer culture" they sought to promote at Pivovarsky Klub, which stocks dozens of regional Czech and international brews. (The restaurant does maintain a smokers' corner in a rear courtyard.)

Dockal said business has been stable since the change, with a slight bump in food sales (from 40 to 45 percent of overall turnover) and "more corporate clientele."

"A handful of our regulars [who smoke] don't come that often anymore," he said. But "we get more and more of those who didn't use to come before and who appreciate the change."

'WINE WANTS CLEAN AIR'

Opening in January in Zizkov, reputedly Prague's beeriest district as measured by the pub-to-resident ratio, the Full Bottles wine bar was already going against the local grain. Management upped the ante by launching smoke-free.

"Wine wants clean air," bartender Ondrej Kubes explained, gesturing toward his palate. Like Pivovarsky Klub's Dockal, Full Bottles' management concluded patrons can better appreciate the signature product if spared clouds of smoke.

Kubes said the bar has attracted a half-local, half-foreign clientele, garnering "more and more customers each month." Oenophiles love the lack of smoke, he said; the only complaints come from the relatively few customers who come in for coffee.

Czechs "like beer or coffee and to smoke," he said, explaining why he thinks a comprehensive smoking ban would not fly here. "It's a beautiful combination."

His view appears to reflect public opinion. In polling last year, nearly 60 percent of Czechs favored taking the smoke out of dining out, but a like number opposed a similar ban in bars and pubs.

"If I [were to] have a restaurant I would definitely have a nonsmoking restaurant, and I am sure it would be a successful one," said Vaclav Starek, secretary-general of the Czech Association of Hotels and Restaurants. "But we are also talking about coffee bars and cigars bars. That's why I think in beer pubs the customer should decide it and not the government."

The association backed the recently approved change in the smoking law, arguing that it should be up to owners to decide whether to accommodate smoking, and up to customers to ratify the decision with their wallets.

The law mandating nonsmoking space "was not very good in real life, because for the pub it was enough to have one table somewhere in the corner with a sign, 'This is a nonsmoking table,' " Starek said. Under the amendment, "at the entrance to the restaurant you will see immediately the sign – this is smoking, this is nonsmoking, this is a combination of both...If the majority of the customers of a restaurant prefer a nonsmoking restaurant, they will themselves push the market."

The problem with this approach, according to anti-tobacco activist Langrova, is that it puts nonsmoking establishments at a disadvantage. In countries that enforce bans across the board, businesses have made up for any loss of smoking customers by attracting new patrons drawn by the cleaner atmosphere, she said. But "if the law does not apply to all the restaurants, it is not so easy to achieve this change."

For his part, restaurateur Dockal adamantly opposes any legal ban. But he does believe he's on the leading edge of a voluntary trend, at least in the capital: "Prague definitely has space for a couple hundred nonsmoking restaurants more."

To beer scribe Rail, a longtime Prague resident, it's a step forward into the past.

"Look, Czechs have been drinking beer for a millennium, or even longer," he said. "Europeans have only had tobacco for less than half that time."

Provided by Transitions Online—Intelligent Eastern Europe

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