Snuffed out for their own good

While visiting family and friends in Maryland this week, I stopped by a smoking-friendly venue in Severna Park with my father for a cigar and a bourbon. The Back Room at the Woodfire Restaurant was explicitly established as a smoking venue, with a humidor from which you can purchase cigars if you haven't brought your own, and a clientele that appreciates the smell of smoldering tobacco. The staff are mostly smokers themselves, and none too pleased by the changes coming in February when Maryland's broad smoking ban goes into effect, snuffing out smokes even in places that were specifically created to offer people an amenable environment in which to light up.

Business was light when I was there (a Monday afternoon), but the customers at the bar were interrogating the bartender over the ultimate fate of the humidor's contents. The disposition of the cigars has yet to be determined, though a smoking-ban sale seems to be in the works. The ultimate fate of the Back Room is also an open question. Can a successful cigar bar find new life as just another place to have a drink? Like it or not, the owners and staff at the Woodfire are about to find out.

And the folks who take advantage of the Back Room's looming cigar sale will probably have to count themselves lucky that they can, for the moment, still enjoy their purchases at home.