Final Draft of Explanatory Narrative

Smoking Ban Transforms Kalamazoo’s Smoker-Friendly Restaurants

A month after the new smoking ban took action in the state of Michigan, Kalamazoo businesses are breathing in the fresh air. Even establishments that were previously known as havens for smokers have readily embraced the change; for some, it was a switch they would have made earlier if not for the fear of losing customers. Dana Owens, a manager at Fourth Coast, says the café didn’t consciously nourish its identity as a smoker-friendly place; it was simply the last Kalamazoo café to allow smoking. The management has wanted to limit the amount of smoking for a while, but they didn’t want to segregate people.

For weeks now signs on the walls of the café have decreed “NO SMOKIN’,” but Fourth Coast still bears reminders of its past. The stale smell of smoke lingers, and the red and yellow checkerboard tables are covered in small circular pockmarks—cigarette burns. For those customers who don’t want to step outside to light up, a poster on the back of a coffee machine advertises a smokeless, electronic cigarette that acts like a nicotine inhaler and can be used even indoors.

Smokers made up such a large part of Fourth Coast’s clientele that the staff was nervous about the change. The coffeehouse has felt the difference, but not in the way it expected: instead of losing customers, it’s gaining them. “More people come in who wouldn’t before,” Owens says. Owens used to smoke himself but doesn’t any more and he prefers to work in a smoke-free environment. “There are less unsavory people who come in just to light up,” he says. “It feels safer, more comfortable.”

Now that Forth Coast is no longer hangout for smokers, the café can more clearly define its identity as a place where creativity is cultivated. Owens says, “We’ve just got this reputation for being more in tune with the artistic community, and I think that’s what’s going to keep us afloat.” That and the devotion and comradeship of the staff. When the café’s ceiling needed renovation, the employees put in extra hours to get it done. “That love, that’s what’s kept us in business for seventeen years,” says Owens. For long-standing neighborhood business like Fourth Coast, the ban is “just another hurdle.”

Another established Kalamazoo business that welcomed the ban was Olde Peninsula Restaurant and Brewpub. Before the ban took action, Olde Peninsula allowed smoking at the bar that forms an island in the center of the restaurant. Some tables are in close proximity to the bar and smoke would sometimes waft into the dining area despite the restaurant’s ventilating system, says Assistant Manager Natasha Tamminga. “There were a few people who would come in and say, ‘We really wish this was non-smoking,’” she says. “If anything, we had a lot of people come in, and if there’s a longer wait, they want to sit at the bar and have a drink while they’re waiting for a table, but if there are a lot of people smoking then they wouldn’t.”

For Olde Peninsula, the ban seems to have no down side. The bar is crowded and noisy on a Sunday night just before closing as friends and couples chatter over pints and plates of onion rings. “We’ve had nothing but positive feedback,” says Tamminga. “Everyone’s really excited that there’s not really a smoking area.”

Especially the management. “Our owner was thinking about going non-smoking earlier but when the Radisson went non-smoking, we checked their numbers and they lost some money at first,” says Tamminga. Not willing to run the risk of losing customers, the restaurant heard the news that a smoking ban was in the works and decided to wait it out until all businesses had to go smoke free.

Judging from the lively scene at the bar, the smoking ban’s goal of creating healthier restaurants and workplaces has been realized without too many hardships for establishments like Olde Peninsula. According to Tamminga, a couple of the restaurant’s staff members even quit smoking as a result of the ban. She neatly sums up the overall attitude to the shift, saying, “I think clean air makes everyone happy.”