So after years of one ridiculous law after another (remember the mini-bottles? where they thought they were controlling our alcohol intake but actually they were giving us double the shots. That was a good one. Plus I loved the little bitty Barbie bottles. So cute. And you've all heard about the Club memberships, right?), they've come up with a doozie.
We call it "the Zion curtain." Apparently if people, especially little underage people, see a bartender opening a beer or see bottles of alcohol sitting behind a bar, they will instantly transform into shot-swigging, beer-bonging alcoholics. Yep, that's all it takes. Never you mind about the good family values instilled by their parochial, upstanding, non-drinking parents and the church community and all the don't-drink PSAs and gory drunk driving videos in school. One glance at those fancy bottles and, poof! you're done for. Man, if it was that easy, marketing people would have been dancing in the streets.
So rather than have that devilish bartender whipping up margaritas or popping a beer right there in the middle of a nice upstanding family restaurant, our brilliant legislators and their cronies over at the DABC have devised this plan: Put up an opaque "wall" between the public and the evil booze man. No. I'm not shitting you. A partition to "hide" the alcohol from those innocent little children and, I'm assuming, those Sunday church-goers who must be DYING for a drink.
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| Leatherheads, a new sports bar which has been "Zion-curtained." Decent bar, but when your bartender is running laps to the back room, sweating, something just ain't right. See how clever they are though? Blow up booze bottles so you know you're at a bar. |
Cuckoo? Right? One of the legislators, Senator Valentine, was on X96 the other day and he actually said that this was the only way people would be able to tell if they were at a bar or at a restaurant. Really? Really. So people are so stupid they can't tell the difference between a bar and a restaurant. For most Utahans, if it doesn't have a drive up window it doesn't count as a restaurant anyway, so that's one obvious tell. And when you try to walk into a bar with your five kids and their fake IDs don't pass the eagle-eyed bouncer, you might just might realize you're not at the family diner-slash-chain restaurant.
I love restaurants. The ambiance. The vibe. The buzz (not the alcohol one). I love that people who do this for a living spend hours agonizing over the details to make sure that the overall visual experience and flow and energy are just perfect as the menu and the service. Why a bunch of judgmental yodleheads make stupid decisions like this that screw up the experience for the 98% of people who are competent enough to manage their children's understanding of and experience with potential dangers in the world is completely beyond me. Not to mention the fact that every single person we entertain from outside the state walls thinks we are INSANE (we are a tourism state, people!). Come on! Factor in the irony that these are the same guys who passionately want government OUT of our personal business. My advice? Be careful what you wish for, boys. The Zion curtain may not stop with a nice glass of wine with dinner.
