EDITORIAL: Playing by rules

Businesses in Laguna are being pushed in many directions. Restaurants and nightspots in particular are having a tough time keeping their doors open, between government regulations, fickle customers, neighborhood complainers and ever-rising rents.

The exit of one of Laguna’s most revered restaurateurs, Javier Sosa of Javier’s, formerly of fondly-remembered Tortilla Flats (now Mozambique), and the impending departure of longtime gathering-place Cedar Creek Inn, which is due to close in March, are just two of the losses in recent years.

Still, business owners are creative types, and they keep coming up with new ways to attract customers and stay in operation.

Javier’s, for instance, has opened up a larger, and by all counts spectacular restaurant a bit north of Laguna, in the Crystal Cove Promenade. That’s an example of what can happen when restaurateurs get creative.

Creativity has its down side, however, when restaurateurs bend or break the rules that govern how they operate. The case of the Rooftop Bar at Casa del Camino is one instance in which an owner successfully campaigned to keep an operation going despite city officials’ determination to bring the practice in line with policies.

It can be difficult to meet the public’s demands within the city codes.

Sometimes innovations are not in keeping with the city permits issued to the businesses when they opened their doors. Sometimes they are able to squeak past the enforcement types and keep doing what works, until something happens that makes it impossible for officials to ignore the out-of-compliance activities.

Case in point: Ocean Avenue Brewery, which has been allowing dancing for more than a dozen years, despite its permit which does not specifically allow it, and the municipal code requirement of a special permit for dancing.

The owner says he’s never had a complaint about the practice of moving aside tables to make a nightly dance floor, but public safety officials disagree.

The police department has reported more than 15 instances of unruly behavior at or near the Brewery in the first 10 months of 2007, and Fire Chief Mike Macey took exception to the restaurant’s habitual over-crowding, at one point ordering revelers out and allowing them back in one-by-one to count heads in order to assure that fire safety codes were being met.

One night, police had to call in Newport Beach officers to help quell an unruly crowd that had gathered outside the establishment, and bloody noses and battery complaints are not uncommon in that block of Laguna — which is also home to other raucous, late-night venues.

It can’t be good for these spots to have a reputation for brawling, and it doesn’t make Laguna Beach look good, either.

Bars and restaurants must keep tabs on their customers’ behavior as well as play by the city rules.