The B.C. government made a minor change to how restaurateurs can serve alcohol on November 24 but it has yet to commit to change some of the many things that restaurant owners have long been lobbying for.
The minor tweak, which Parliamentary Secretary for Liquor Reform, John Yap, announced at Luke’s Bar and Kitchen on Granville Street, was that patrons who go to a restaurant and only order a drink no longer must be relegated to a separate lounge area.
Instead, those drinkers can sit anywhere in the restaurant.
Luke’s owner Mark Roberts praised the change by saying “these kinds of rule changes make it easier for us to run the business.”
Owners at fine dining restaurants, however, shrugged off the change as immaterial to their business.
“No, it won’t affect me much,” said Cioppino’s owner Pino Posteraro.
“I’m a place where people come and eat. They don’t come just for drinking. The [regulatory] change is for pubs, not for me.”
Some of Posteraro’s longstanding concerns include that restaurant owners:
•do not get any discount off the full BCLDB retail price, plus GST;
•are forced to buy all alcohol from government-run liquor stores and are not free to also buy from the province’s approximately 670 private liquor stores or the 12 independent wine stores;
•are forced to return tainted, or corked, wine to the government-run liquor store where it was purchased, along with a receipt, instead of being able to return the wine to any of the 196 government-run stores.
(Luke's Bar and Kitchen owner Mark Roberts likes the B.C. government's latest tweak to liquor regulations | Glen Korstrom)
Yap told Business in Vancouver that he is still consulting with the industry and that all of the above changes are still possible.
“There is no decision yet,” Yap said of the above changes. “We’re still consulting.”
Another of Pino’s concerns is that the prices he pays for wine have been bouncing around and that makes it difficult for him to keep his prices fixed.
(Pino Posterero wants to be able to buy wine from private liquor stores and wine stores | Rob Kruyt)
Given that he has wine prices on menus, stability is important, he explained.
Yap said he is aware of these complaints and that he is reviewing the pricing system.
“We hope in the new year to come up with some recommendations,” he told BIV.
Standing next to Yap, British Columbia Restaurant and Foodservices Association CEO Ian Tostenson downplayed price volatility as “not that bad.”
“One of the things that John is doing for industry is to make sure that we can smooth [price volatility] as best we can,” he said.
