"When you talk about a state-wide ban that's one thing," City Councillor Timothy J. Toomey said this week. "But when you start doing it community by community you place Cambridge restaurants at a disadvantage."
Many in Brookline say their smoking customers have begun dining out of town rather than pocketing their "We're afraid people are saying, 'We're not going to go to the Golden Temple anymore,'" general manager of the Brookline Chinese restaurant Eric J.E. Hornfeldt said earlier this week. The Golden Temple's owner, Frank Taw, reported losses of $7751.63 in an affidavit he filed comparing the period of June through September 1993 with that same period this year. "There's a real concern about putting some establishments in severe restraint," City Councillor Michael A. Sullivan said Monday. "We don't want to kill those establishments." Speaking for restaurants smaller than his own, Greenville Byron, president of John Harvard's Brew House and a leader in negotiations with the DHH, addressed the danger to Cambridge restaurants in similar tones. "These people are small businesses. This is their life," he said this week. "You're not dealing with rich people who if their restaurant goes under will shrug their shoulders and walk off into the sunset." Negotiations between the owners and the Tobacco Control Program have completed their first stage, according to Anderson, and in January both sides will begin "going back to [their] constituencies" to formulate more detailed proposals