It's a Saturday night. You and your best friend sit down for some games at Ollie's on Decatur and Blue Diamond. Then the habit he can't kick kicks in, "Can I have an ashtray please?"
Then you get a little hungry, "I'm thinking chicken fingers. Mild."
Steve Minagil with the Southern Nevada Health District says this night out is all wrong. Ollie's and many other bars and restaurants like it are breaking the smoking ban every night.
Minagil says Nevada Revised Statutes 202.2483 is meant to protect people from smoke indoors, "Government buildings, malls, all areas of grocery stores, all indoor areas within restaurants."
The protection from smoke extends to all eateries. The law says you cannot get cooked or prepared food of any kind, only "bar food."
"Pre-packaged items, pretzels, peanuts, chips, those kinds of things," said Minagil.
So no menus, no real meals, and the smoking bar area by law has to be "physically segregated" by glass walls, doors or a separate entrance.
"If there is a walkway into the bar from the restaurant, if there's a swinging saloon door, that's not physically segregated," said Minagil.
Now restaurants are flexing their creative muscles, hoping they won't get caught. Bilbo's tried ashtrays that they called advertisement novelties. Buffalo Wild Wings now hands out paper cups instead of ashtrays in the bar area. You still get food piping hot right at the bar.
The Buffalo Wild Wings corporate office never returned calls about those paper cups and food service.
But back at Ollie's, the food has arrived. Those mild chicken fingers and your buddy's burger aren't on plates though. The waitress says the white Styrofoam containers are the only way they can comply with the smoking law.
"We can't have plates or silverware or anything like that," she said.
"We only serve food in to go containers with to go cutlery kits, which are packaged," said Ollie's bar manager David Kring.
The way Kring reads the law, he can give customers food in plastic bags to take home. It's up to them if they choose to stay, smoke and play. It's the only way Kring can compete with real casinos and get his players back, "I could go to any local casino and find 10 to 15 of my ex-customers playing there now."
He says the smoking ban is a broken law that can force taverns out of business. He might be right.
"You have bars closing their doors. You have people losing their jobs. In this economy? In this time?" he said.
Minagil says the law turns his inspectors into de facto police. Without proper manpower, this could cause trouble from dusk to dawn, "To be going out at three in the morning to biker bars and tapping guys on the shoulder that have a Hells Angel jacket on and say, ‘Excuse me. Can I have your ID? I'm going to have to write you a citation.'"
Both sides say there are big problems with the ban, not in principle, but just the way it's written. It forces owners to find loopholes and it forces the health district to become a police force. Neither side can win.
After six years of success, Kring had to let more than a dozen people go. He had little choice. It's just the consequences of a flawed law -- unique interpretations and owners desperately clinging to food, fortune and the smoke that comes between it all.
Click here to email Reporter Jonathan Humbert.
