IT'S TOO EASY to forget about the District's year-old indoor smoking ban for bars and restaurants. Except, of course, when you walk into a place where the ban doesn't apply and a smoky haze greets you at the door. That was the case Saturday night at Soussi, on the 18th Street NW strip in Adams Morgan. Because Soussi is a hookah bar, the place has escaped the city's ban and cigarettes are just as prevalent as the traditional shisha. But that's a rare exception in a region where some jurisdictions have banned indoor smoking and others may restrict it in the future.

After Montgomery County banned smoking at its bars and restaurants in 2002; similar restrictions went into effect in other Maryland counties, followed by a statewide ban this past February. Just as the District's smoking ban took effect last January, the new House speaker, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of smoke-free California, banned smoking in the Speaker's Lobby, a longtime refuge for lawmakers who liked to relax or conduct off-the-floor legislative business or press interviews with cigars and cigarettes.

Across the river in Virginia where tobacco is king, local jurisdictions like Arlington County and the city of Alexandria are eying future smoking bans. Officials in Alexandria and Arlington have both expressed their support for a statewide ban. But as The Post's Daniela Deane recently reported, "the County Board would be happy if the state allowed localities to limit smoking in their jurisdictions as 'an interim step,'" according to outgoing Arlington County Board Chairman Paul Ferguson. Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, who supports a restaurant smoking ban, may press new legislation in the upcoming session of the General Assembly.

All in all, the smoking bans across the area may be a sign of the times. Even steakhouses — where cigar smoke has traditionally gone hand in hand with red meat and cocktails — are backing away from the legacy of the smoke-filled room. "I still miss the aroma of a good cigar, but I would never go back. I think the business is so much more manageable this way," said Ned Mirkovic, general manager of Morton's in Bethesda, where all indoor smoking is banned, just like in the rest of Montgomery County.

In recent years, some D.C. steakhouses have found themselves in a tough spot, as restaurant tastes and political fortunes have changed. Just as the city's restaurant scene has been increasingly shunning traditional meat-and-potatoes fare, Don Shula's steakhouse in the West End closed its doors last year, shuttering one of the few, if only, places in the city that would put your name on the wall for consuming a gigantic amount of meat. And Signatures, the Pennsylvania Avenue restaurant owned by now-jailed super-Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff — who offered a steak for $74 and an in-house cigar humidor for top guests — closed in the midst of a federal probe into his lobbying misdeeds.

In a recent interview, Mirkovic said that people's tastes are shifting and even without the various smoking bans in the area, restaurateurs have been adapting their dining and bar environments. "The saloon atmosphere has shifted, it has changed," he said, noting that some area Morton's locations have been moving away from darker, subdued interiors — where cigar smoke would add to the ambiance — to a more airy and lighter design for dining and bar areas where smokers would feel out of place, even if they were allowed to light up in the first place. It's a shift Mirkovic said other steakhouses are slowly adapting to as well. Still, there are some Morton's regulars from D.C. and Maryland who will travel to Morton's Virginia locations to enjoy a cigar, Mirkovic said.

Of course, there are still some smoke-filled rooms left in the District, including Shelly's Back Room on F Street NW and Cleveland Park's Aroma, which has a hardship exemption under the D.C. smoking ban legislation. Wrote Fritz Hahn of washingtonpost.com's Going Out Gurus in October:

In the six months after the smoking ban began, Aroma's owners say, business fell at least 20 percent from the year before. "Aroma was set up as a cigar bar, and [smoking] was pretty core to its identity," explains Curt Large, the chief operating officer of Bedrock Management, Aroma's parent company. Once smokers could no longer enjoy a cigar or cigarette with their cocktails or cognac, he says, they simply stopped coming.

But it's not that bars and restaurants have completely turned their backs on their smoking clientele. As Express recently noted, smokers are finding more and more restaurants and bars deploying heat lamps to sidewalks, courtyards and patios, creating a winter weather refuge for those wanting to light up. Additionally, that icon of smoking, the matchbook, hasn't gone away either.

Smokefree D.C., the volunteer organization that lobbied for the D.C. smoking ban, has been monitoring its implementation over the past year. The group's co-founder Angela Bradbery said in a recent interview that "there's not much to report because it's gone so well."

She said that D.C.'s experience with its smoking ban has generally mirrored those of other jurisdictions that have restricted smoking. In most cases, businesses haven't been hurt by such restrictions. "The fears that people had haven't come true," she said. "I think the longer it's in place, that happier they'll be."

EARLIER:
» "Matchbooks Aplenty Despite D.C. Smoking Ban" [Free Ride/Express]
» "Outdoor Heat Lamps Give Smokers Winter Refuge" [Free Ride/Express]

» "Smoking Ban Signed Into Law" [WaPo]
» "Pelosi Tells Smokers to Butt Out" [Roll Call, subscription req'd]
» "Arlington, Alexandria Define Legislative Priorities" [WaPo]
» "Kaine Wants Smoking Ban in All Va. Restaurants" [WaPo]
» "New Smoking Ban Proposed" [Times-Dispatch]
» "For Lobbyist, a Seat of Power Came With a Plate" [NYT]
» "Aroma Lights Up the Night" [Going Out Gurus/WaPo]

Photos by Bruno Vincent/Getty Images, Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post and Michael Temchine for The Washington Post

Posted by Michael Grass at 2:33 PM on December 31, 2007
Tagged in D.C. Government , Eating Around , Free Ride , Maryland , News , Out & About , The District , Top Stories , Virginia