REVscene Automotive Forum - New city liquor bylaw to limit sale of fine wines in Vancouver restaurants Jan 1st

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New city liquor bylaw to limit sale of fine wines in Vancouver restaurants Jan 1st

great way to embarrass the city during the olympics, once again CoV nimby squad in action :thumbsup:

vancouver sun

Quote:

VANCOUVER - Imagine this: Out for a meal in a Vancouver restaurant, you spend $30 to $40 on entrees. But when you order a $45 bottle of B.C. wine, your waiter says: “Sorry, this is Vancouver; you’ll have to buy something cheaper.”

That’s exactly what could happen after Jan. 1, when the city’s new liquor licensing bylaw comes into effect.

An obscure subsection of the bylaw casts a regulatory net — intended to nab restaurants that are all bar and no food — that snares just about every other restaurant with a wine list aspiring to offer more than bulk wines. Under the bylaw, approved by city council Oct. 8 and coming into effect Jan. 1, the food portion of all restaurant receipts must account for at least 50 per cent of all revenues over any eight-hour period.

The city is imposing an annual $3-a-seat tax on all city restaurants, raising money to hire food police who will make sure restaurants comply.

That’s the death knell for upper-end wine sales at all but the more costly restaurants in town, says Ian Tostenson, president of the B.C. Restaurant and Food Services Association.

“We are going into the Olympics; we want to showcase British Columbia; we want to showcase B.C. wines and B.C. wines are not known for being inexpensive so that could kill it. The waiter could end up saying ‘Sorry, I can’t sell you that $45 bottle of wine.’”

Wine lawyer Mark Hicken said in an interview the effect on fine wine sales could be dramatic. “If the manager for the night notices that the restaurant is running 50/50, then theoretically he or she should prevent customers from ordering expensive wine because that would throw the restaurant off for the 8-hour period,” he said in his blog Winelaw.ca. “As the Olympics approaches, this is a huge backward step for the modernization of wine laws in Vancouver.”

The new law is aimed at restaurants that operate as bars, contrary to the licence bylaw, which separates food establishments from bars. The city conducted an undercover operation to see how bad the problem was and found in once instance, a police officer was served six drinks and no food at a licensed restaurant.

“What the city is interested in is: a restaurant is in the business of selling food and liquor but a handful of restaurants have apparently been acting more like bars than restaurants. That’s what everyone wants to avoid here,” Tostenson said in an interview.

Tostenson is to meet with city officials soon over the issue. He believes the city will rewrite the bylaw. “It’s the unintended consequence of the city trying to do the right thing,” he said. “But it needs to be rejigged.”

The issue flared up when James Iranzad, of Corkscrew Entertainment, started organizing restaurateurs to fight the bylaw. In an e-mail, Iranzad said it’s impossible for restaurants to meet the new bylaw. Corkscrew operates three restaurants in the city: Hell’s Kitchen, Abigail’s Party and the Flying Tiger.

Iranzad declined to be interviewed, but a glance at the company’s menus shows entrees typically range from $12 to $21. Most wines are in the $30 to $60 range. But a bottle of B.C. red Nota Bene, at $78, would require a couple to also eat two orders of B.C. halibut at $21 each, plus one order of Moroccan chicken at $21 and three desserts to be within the bylaw.

food primary, should be food primary, but not so anal about it.

this is just another case of 1 offender, and the city using it as a scapegoat to make extra revenue.

It may be one of those things that's there but rarely enforced. Like not serving to inebriated customers.

no its enforced. They shut down el furnituro warehouse twice because of it.

sounds rather ridiculous

i guess they want to keep all alcohol sales in the BC Liquor Stores

Pretty idiotic if you ask me. I'm pretty much at restaurants like Joeys, Glowbal & Cactus daily after the market close, and my bill is usually always 100% liquor and that goes for all my co-workers and other people I see after the market in these places. Even when I go out for dinner, at best my bill is 80% liquor 20% food.

Lol wtf, another bs rule. Now restrictions to fine wine in a restaurant
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I think BC has the most absolutely rediculous liquor laws in North America.

Why in god's name did they do dollar values and not number of food vs alcohol orders? Idiots.
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so whats the point now of restaurants last call of liquor till 2am on weekend ?

you would think they'd be trying to make it easier for businesses to profit from the olympics

FOOD POLICE?!? usrs?

fuck, I'm really starting to hate BC,

every fucking piece of legislation handed down intended to make any industry better makes it worse, and strangles every businessman to death until they close shop, so they can plow everything down and turn it into condos for old people, I mean... look at Victoria.

with cost of liq. through the roof in BC (in general), im sticking to POT

They're really not making it easy on the restaurant industry. First the HST, and now these stupid rules PLUS a new $3 per seat tax???

Yep, the government REALLY wants me to spend my money going out to eat. :rolleyes:

^ wut 3 dollar seat rule?
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Quote:

Originally Posted by azzurro32 (Post 6657249)

^ wut 3 dollar seat rule?
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The city will tax restaurants $3 per seat so they can hire "food police" to ensure the 50% rule. Odds are the restaurants will pass this cost onto the consumer.

city of vancouver are boneheads
take for example the new robson square / ice rink renovations.
there were plans for a clam shell type structure
http://i75.photobucket.com/albums/i3...tcav/North.jpg

so they build this with no way to get down there directly from the street
http://img524.imageshack.us/img524/1854/p9011143.jpg

&then they put up hedges infront of a glass railing
http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/9...sept2409p1.jpg

&then the bc government does this
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2428/...cec76db5_b.jpg

Wow, so much panic over so much misinterpretation.

"...the food portion of all restaurant receipts must account for at least 50 per cent of all revenues over any eight-hour period."

That doesn't mean an individual bill can't be more than 50% liquor... it means the total sales can't be more than 50%. If you have three tables order $50 worth of food and NO liquor, a fourth table can order up to $200 worth of booze to go with their $50 worth of food.

Sure it's a stupid law, but people over-reacting is even stupider.

^as a manager, how would you ensure the 50/50 though, you wouldn't hope and pray that the table that's ordering $200 worth of liquor is compensated by SEVERAL tables that order food only. If it doesn't happen, you're fucked; you gotta have some type of system to maintain that level

Quote:

Originally Posted by Soundy (Post 6657265)

Yea that I was able to gather, but I seriously think this will be a problem for places like Joeys, Cactus, Keg, etc.. in Yaletown and the downtown core. I'm at these places almost daily and pretty much every table in there orders 80 to 100% alcohol at least from what I see and from what staff say. I know the Joeys in Bentall already got in trouble for this before, but it wasn't really enforced too much.

Take the Joeys at Bentall and Cactus on Burrard for example, its surrounded by brokerage houses, and every Monday to Friday, everyone always heads down there after market close at 1pm and sometimes stay all night, its usually full of brokers, stock promotors and IR/public company guys and no-one really orders food, just drink after drink. I was there Monday and my bill was $250ish, the only food order on my bill was the chilli chicken which was about $15 and this was typical with the 30-40 people I ran into while there. Yesterday I was at Cactus for 2hrs and my bill was $120, 100% of it liquor. Places like that will have a problem and need multiple tables of food only orders to balance that off, either that or try and make every consumer order more food when they aren't hungry or don't really want to, I can't see that going over too well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Illuminate (Post 6657283)

in the west end. only 2-3 (dover arms pub being 1) places are allowed to serve liq. without food. Even the pub i frequently visit, after the first 2-3 beers/drinks we are cut off and asked to purchase food in order to drink.. this is just extension of that stupid rule..:mad:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Illuminate (Post 6657283)

Shouldn't be hard for most modern paypoint systems to spit out an up-to-the-minute report on the split at a moment's notice. If you're getting near the end of the shift and find your totals skewed a bit, grab an employee who's going off-shift, slip him some money out of petty cash, and tell him to buy a nice expensive meal for himself.

Point is, it's ridiculous to think that EVERY bill will have to fall under the 50% split, all the time. All you have to do is average out at the end of the night.

And yes, it's still a stupid law, but it's hardly worth all this hand-wringing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by 7seven (Post 6657285)

Yes, but it's also within an eight-hour period. Your after-work drinks-and-appies will balance out with people coming in later for dinner. Yeah, it might be a little trickier for some of the places you mentioned to average it out, but it's not going to be THAT big a discrepancy EVERY NIGHT.