Promenade Drinking Curfew OKd : Alcohol: No liquor will be allowed at outdoor patios after midnight. Council fears area is getting reputation as a ‘bar crawl’ scene.

Each night at the stroke of 12, liquor will vanish from the outdoor dining patios at the thronged Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica under a new alcohol curfew.

The curfew--with no liquor sold outdoors after 11:30 p.m. or allowed on the tables after midnight--was imposed by the Santa Monica City Council on Tuesday night in a move to put a damper on late-night revelry along the Promenade.

City Councilman Dennis Zane described the Promenade on weekends as a “fairly noisy--even on occasion rowdy” party scene. “We’re afraid the Promenade might get an unfortunate and inappropriate reputation as being a sort of a bar-crawl” for the region, he said.

The once moribund three-block outdoor mall between Colorado Avenue and Wilshire Boulevards has been redeveloped into a thriving indoor-outdoor entertainment center that depends on that rarity in Southern California--pedestrians.

Its mix of movies, restaurants, music clubs and street performers has drawn a varied crowd of all ages, but recently on late weekend nights adults under 25 have predominated, council members said. Zane billed the curbs as “protecting the Promenade’s ambience” and managing the “dilemmas of success.”

In addition to the restricted hours, the regulations approved Tuesday include a noise standard: If one is inside with the door closed and can hear music from next door, it’s too loud. The council will later address regulation of street performers.

The alcohol restrictions did not sit well with a veritable “Who’s Who” of Santa Monica restaurateurs who spoke at a public hearing that lasted well past what will soon be the curfew for outdoor liquor consumption.

The restaurant operators said the council had misdiagnosed the problem, was acting too hastily and was imposing blanket restrictions that would not address the issue.

“To assume bar-crawling is a function of an outdoor dining area is simply distorting the issue,” said Jivan Tabibian, the owner of Remi, an Italian restaurant on the Promenade.

Tabibian said the noise and rowdiness problem stemmed more from the lines of people--sometimes 50 to 100--waiting to get into a club, than from the people sitting down at outside tables. “The commotion is between places and not so much in places,” he said.

The owners or operators of Promenade eateries Teasers, Chillers, Broadway Bar & Grill, Legends, Yankee Doodles and Bravo Cucina also urged the council to give them a chance to police themselves, as the business people say they are now doing.

Because the regulations under consideration Tuesday include guidelines for Ocean Avenue outdoor dining, the owners of Ivy at the Shore, I Cugini, Ocean Avenue Seafood, and Fennel also testified. The Ocean Avenue issues, however, were withdrawn and will be considered later.

In urging the council not to impose further regulations, the restaurant representatives pointed out that the city already has a potent weapon at its disposal--the power to deny renewal of an establishment’s monthly outdoor dining permit if it violates existing rules by turning a patio into an alfresco bar late at night.

Alternatively, the group asked for a six-month delay to study the problem before rushing in to fix a situation that they contended has not gotten out of hand. The owners challenged the council to be specific in documenting the problems that need attention.

The lawmakers could not specify particular incidents that sparked their action, though City Manager John Jalili recalled one incident in which people in a line grabbed someone they thought had cut into the line and put his head in a toilet.

Council members said they were acting based on their own recent experiences of the shifting “mix” of the crowd. Councilman Ken Genser said several women had told him that they were uncomfortable on the promenade late at night because of a “predominantly male college population drinking only.”

John Clarizio, owner of the 3rd Street Pub & Grill, was one of many who advised the council that it was tampering with an atmosphere that the city and the Promenade merchants had worked hard to create. There is a surge of late-night dining, with drinks, after 10:30 p.m. when movies let out, the restaurateurs reported.

As originally considered Tuesday night, the regulations would have stopped alcohol service at 11 p.m. The restaurant representatives, however, persuaded the council that such a curfew would be a serious inconvenience to a very desirable group of customers--those who make it an evening at the Promenade by attending a movie and then walking to dinner.

The council voted 5 to 2 to extend the proposed 11 p.m. curfew by half an hour. Councilmen Genser and Kelly Olsen dissented. Olsen said he did not feel obliged to “preserve a right to drink on public property.”

A more liberal closing time proposed by Council member Herb Katz, for midnight on weeknights and 1 a.m. on weekends, was defeated.

All versions of the regulations include a requirement that alcohol must be served with food in the outdoor dining areas. Alcoholic beverage service inside the establishments is not affected by the curfew.

The measure also addressed the dimensions, setbacks and awning sizes allowed on outdoor patios, leading to cries of foul from early tenants who had invested in awnings and equipment under the old rules.