Seen from the outside, the small Podshoffe cafe on Pushkinska Street has a simple elegance.
But it isn’t just the nice interior or tasty pasta that brings the customers in. Podshoffe lets customers puff away in peace in spite of a national ban on smoking in public places.
On Dec. 16, a blanket smoking prohibition in all venues without exception took effect. Anti-smoking activists say it’s going better than anyone expected. A Research & Branding Group survey shows the ban is supported by 75 percent of Ukrainians and 49 percent of smokers.
But some still find solutions to keep their smoking clientele happy.
“We don’t offer ashtrays to customers, and we have a non-smoking sign, so formally we don’t allow smoking, but people can smoke,” said Podshoffe’s administrator, who refused to give her name.
But this strange logic doesn’t prevent the cafe’s staff from offering reservations in a specific “smoking” zone.
When asked if they had ever run into problems with the authorities, the administrator giggled and said no.
Yet anti-tobacco activists claim such violators are very few.
A survey of Ukraine’s 13 biggest cities by Smoke Free Ukraine found that 93 percent of venues obey the ban. Activists spotted smokers in 76 establishments out of 1,133 they visited. Most violators were in nightclubs, bars and billiard clubs. In Kyiv, though, the share of smoker-friendly cafes is slightly bigger – 9 percent of the 120 venues checked.
Sergiy Gusovsky, the owner of five restaurants in Kyiv, prohibited smoking in his venues far before the official ban. Pantagruel, a restaurant near Golden Gate, went smoke-free almost two years ago.
“I noticed that smokers prefer to reserve a table in a non-smoking room and go to a smoking area for a cigarette. So even smokers want to eat in a non-smoking area,” Gusovsky said.
He added that the policy didn’t affect the number of customers.
“If customers avoid a restaurant because they can’t smoke there, it only means they don’t appreciate good food,” he says.
Not everyone agrees, though, with some coming up with tricks to evade the ban. The most popular is allowing smoking on terraces.
“In theory, a terrace is not a room of a restaurant, and smoking is allowed there. But in practice, some terraces are actually real buildings, and in those cases it’s unclear if they should be smoking zones or not,” says Olena Dub, a coordinator for Smoke Free Kyiv.
Some venues designate separate rooms for smoking and claim that those rooms are not formally part of their venue. But there is a trick with the rooms, too.
“Sometimes they say – here is the restaurant, and this room is, say, an inquiry office. If the room is a private apartment, it’s fine. But if it’s registered as an office, which is more likely, it still falls under the ban. A smoking area is allowed to occupy only up to 10 percent of an office’s total area,” says Kostyantyn Krasovsky, head of the tobacco control sector in the Ukrainian Strategy Research Institute.
Still both Krasovsky and Dub say the ban’s results have exceeded their expectations.
Things would almost be perfect if not for hookah-smoking, banned just like cigarettes and cigars, but a popular pastime at hookah bars. These have no choice but to close up or break the law.
To smoke a waterpipe in Marakesh, an Eastern-themed restaurant and hookah bar on Sahaidachnogo Street in Kyiv, customers go to a separate hall where they can still be served food and drinks, but will also be allowed to smoke hookah.
Administrators at Marakesh and Podshoffe both warn they cannot guarantee their customer won’t be fined, though. However, the biggest fine a customer can get is Hr 175, the price of a lamb fillet at Marakesh or two servings of fish in Podshoffe.
For venues, the fine is much higher, going from Hr 1,000 to Hr 10,000, depending on the police officer’s discretion.
The state institution in charge of overseeing the ban’s enforcement, the Customers Rights Service, has in two months, handed out Hr 44,000 in fines.
In early February a draft law was proposed to soften the ban, leaving it up to restaurants to decide. Krasovsky, however, doesn’t expect it to be passed by parliament.
“This ban has such large support that taking it away would be like political death for deputies,” he says.
Kyiv Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected]. Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko contributed to this story.
