LEO's Eats with Robin Garr
Sometimes it is good to be wrong.
Consider, for example, this prophecy I uttered in 2010: “Since the passage of Louisville’s no-smoking law for restaurants and bars, the patios have become the de facto smoking section. If this doesn’t bother you, great! But to be blunt, it makes most patios no-go zones for me.”
That forecast made sense at the time, a couple years after the city banned all smoking indoors at restaurants and bars. Initially, the ban inspired glum forecasts that the exodus of smokers would drive most eateries and watering holes out of business, turning Louisville into a dismal purgatory akin to, say, the main drag in Booneville, Ky.
Happily, that scenario didn’t play out. Neither the smoking ban nor the Great Recession did much to slow down our booming restaurant scene.
But my prediction seemed more reasonable: Rather than giving up dining out entirely, surely smokers would simply head outdoors to light up.
Initially, that seemed to be the case. Grumpily, I would stride past patio areas with eyes and nose averted, choosing the purified environment within. But something funny happened while I wasn’t paying attention. More and more, especially in the “fine dining” sector, management began choosing to declare their al fresco areas smoke-free, even without the pressure of a law.
Read the full column on LouisvilleHotBytes:
http://www.louisvillehotbytes.com/smoke ... ecessarily
And in LEO Weekly:
http://leoweekly.com/dining/al-fresco-d ... ecessarily