Living: Sour Grapes in the Big Apple

Restaurant patrons are forbidden to carry in their own wine

Even for a town given to loud arguments over potholes and Billy Martin, the latest squabble in New York City seemed frivolous. To some, it became known as the Great Brown-Bagging Controversy. But to others, it looked more like a tempest in a wine cooler. It all began with an innocent New York Times story about 16 restaurants that permitted patrons to bring in their own wine. In Manhattan, where a $5 bottle of wine can cost $15 in a moderately priced restaurant, many customers beat the system by finding a dining spot without a liquor license and then carrying their own bottles to the establishment in a brown paper bag. The January Times story delighted many of its readers but roused the state liquor authority (SLA).

Acting on a near forgotten law of 1969, the SLA sent tart notes to owners of ten of the Times’s restaurants that did not have licenses. The letter ordered them to stop the practice of brown bagging on threat of fines or imprisonment for up to a year. The order astonished the restaurateurs, many of whom had never heard of the rule. “We were stunned,” said Gerald Holmes, co-owner of the Grove Street Café. Cynthia Walsh, co-owner of Summerhouse, a Madison Avenue restaurant, said she was losing customers and $1,000 a day by complying with the state directive. Grove Street Café and Summerhouse are just two of several hundred bring-your-own-bottle restaurants in New York City. Some of these establishments are ineligible to serve alcohol because they are within 200 feet of a church or school; others are waiting for the state bureaucracy to okay their license applications, a process that can take as long as a year.

Like many controversies in the Big Apple, this one quickly involved the ebullient, omniactive Mayor Edward Koch. Alfredo Viazzi, owner of Trattoria da Alfredo, a pocket-size Greenwich Village eating house, squealed to the press that hizzoner was a frequent brown-bagging customer. What is more, Viazzi dared the liquor authority to do something about it. After all, Viazzi said, “nobody is going to arrest the mayor. It’s crazy. I’ve been letting my customers carry in their own wine for 12½ years and keeping everybody happy. Now they find an old dusty law and they make everybody unhappy.”

Reporters promptly cornered the mayor, who proved no fan of the state liquor authority crackdown. “It’s archaic, it’s arcane, it’s stupid,” Koch fumed. “It’ll raise the price of dinner. You like to get a little bargain now and then. I mean, that’s what life is all about.” Koch suggested that the SLA suspend its directive.

His advice did not meet with enthusiastic approval at the state agency. Said Anthony Papa of the SLA: “The mayor gets what, $110,000? For him to be brown bagging is ridiculous.” Papa then countered with a blatant diversion, urging that Koch suspend the city’s crazy-quilt parking regulations. Gibed Papa: “Those aren’t too popular, are they?”

Seizing the high ground, the mayor said he did not break the law lightly, but in this case, his act was required by “the cause of freedom.” In a letter to Anthony V. Gazzara, chairman of the SLA, Koch vowed he would go on breaking the law, adding that “the question then will be whether you shall arrest the restaurateur or me.”

New York is hardly alone in its bottle dilemma. Other jurisdictions, including California and the District of Columbia, technically forbid brown bagging but allow it in practice. (Some states, such as Illinois and Massachusetts, have no laws prohibiting customers from bringing alcoholic beverages into restaurants.) To straighten out the New York mess, legislative wheels are now in motion for passage of an amendment allowing brown bagging with the consent of restaurant owners. Officials at the SLA are taking the position that they were only doing their job. “We’re dutybound to go after [violations],” said one spokesman. “If people don’t like the law, let them change it.”