Living in the midwest and hearing accounts of the broad-sweeping smoking bans that are being cast down onto the citizens of California tends to conjure up images of cigar smokers being relegated to dark, hidden, musty basements and back alleys.
While this reality may still be upon us in the near future, I was happy to find an oasis on a recent trip to Palo Alto in which my colleagues and I could enjoy a good meal and a cigar in a great environment.
Before I get into the details of the cigar lounge, the restaurant portion of La Bodeguita del Medio definitely deserves a mention. The food, mohitos, and service alone would be enough to make me come back to this place, even if I wasn’t planning on taking advantage of the cigar lounge (not sure why that would ever be the case, but you get my point). They’ve also got an incredibly extensive list of sipping rums.
As good as the food is, for cigar smokers, the cigar lounge is still the main attraction. While my colleagues and I were at the bar waiting for a table for dinner, my curiosity got the best of me and I took a quick walk to the back of the building to glance into the cigar lounge. I’ll let the pictures do most of the describing for me, but needless to say, I couldn’t wait for dinner to be over with so I could sit back on a nice leather sofa and kick my feet up.
The indoor portion of the lounge is big enough to hold 20 to 25 people, and there were probably around 15 there when we wrapped up dinner and staked our claim to a corner portion of the room. The walk-in humidor is small and the selection is fairly limited but many of the more popular brands are represented (My Father, Graycliff, Rocky Patel).
I haven’t visited enough to get a feel for what the typical patron is like at this lounge, but there was a great mix on the night we were there, ranging from a boisterous group of six or seven 20-something professionals (I would have guessed it to be a bachelor party if it hadn’t been a Thursday), a lone cigar-smoker reading a book, and a group of older business men.
The California regulation reared its ugly head in two interesting ways. One was the unique way that you enter the locked walk-in humidor. I left the lounge area and walked to the bar to ask a bar tender to let me in. Upon returning to the back area, she took out her keys to unlock a door on the side of the hallway, she instructed me that by law, as an employee of the bar/restaurant she wasn’t allowed to enter the smoking lounge. She told me to return to the lounge and that she would unlock the door to the humidor from the inside (she did).
The other interesting impact of the smoking regulation was clearly marked on one of the lounge’s windows: “This Window is to Remain Open During Business Hours.” On any given day in the Bay Area, I’m sure this isn’t a problem. Unfortunately I visited on a week when the evening lows were near 30 degrees. This prompted everyone who entered the lounge (including us) to immediately walk over to the window and attempt to shut it before realizing it was being held open by a block of wood (which then led them to read the label).
On days when the weather is more California-like, there is a nice-sized outdoor patio that you can access from the back door of the cigar lounge that I’m sure gets a lot of use.
It was nice to get the sad, dark images of California cigar smoking out of my head and realize that lively places like this still exist. I’m looking forward to my next opportunity to visit the left coast and exploring some more of these diamonds-in-the-rough.
I’ve received a lot of valuable feedback recently from CigarPlaces.com power users about the ability to remove locations from the map (or lack thereof). As the map continues to grow, and cigar laws continue to change around the world, it’s becoming more and more important for us to ensure that users have the ability to remove invalid listings, in order to ensure the data on the map is as accurate as possible.
The New Functionality
The new “Remove Location” page will allow you to remove a location from the map if it is a duplicate listing (is listed on the map more than once), is no longer cigar friendly, or is no longer in business. After submitting the form, our team will perform a quick review of the listing, and will make sure that the map gets updated accordingly.
You can get to this page by clicking “Remove from Map / Flag as Not Cigar Friendly” on any location page.
Removing Locations Completely
Our policy since the site has launched has been to keep locations on the map that have been flagged as not cigar friendly, and simply indicate to the user that it’s not a cigar friendly place. The feedback that I’ve received recently is that this is troublesome for users.
Our new process will be to flag the location as not friendly (except for duplicates) so that users are aware of the location while we confirm that the location is unfriendly or out of business (via a phone call or other method).
After the information has been confirmed, the location will be removed from the map altogether.
Login No Longer Required
We’re always looking to ensure that the data is accurate, without opening the door for someone to come in and corrupt things on a whim (we all know that there are passionate anti-smoking individuals out there that aren’t happy about the existence of cigar bars). The way we handled this previously was to require the creation of an account before a user could flag a location as not cigar friendly. It wasn’t fool-proof, but it did the job.
With the creation of the new removal process, it is no longer necessary to log in or create an account if you just want to remove a listing from the map. We’re hoping that this reduces the barriers to the removal process, and encourages more cigar smokers to remove a location if they see that it is invalid.
The Best Kind of Feedback
I receive emails all the time that start with, “We were sitting around having a cigar and CigarPlaces.com came up. We all thought it would be great if you could …” and end with incredible suggestions about new functionality, changes, etc. I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who has sent an email like that, and let everyone know to keep the emails coming! (send them here)
If you’re a cigar smoker, and you haven’t taken the time to fill out the form on the CRA site to email your congressmen about the anti-cigar regulation that has been filed by the FDA, please take the time to do so now (more details about the CRA Action Alert below).
I submitted the form on November 30th, which emailed Michigan Representative Gary Peters(D), and Senators Carl Levin(D), and Debbie Stabenow(D).
The form will send the following email to your senators and representatives, urging them to oppose the regulation:
As your constituent and a voter, I urge you to co-sponsor House Bill 1639!
H.R. 1639 will protect the small businesses and jobs that make up this fragile, intimate premium cigar industry. If FDA were to exercise regulation over premium cigars, thousands of U.S. jobs would be at stake.
Why is H.R. 1639 so important to me?
Some of the measures FDA could consider, as I believe they are, include:
• Ban on walk-in humidors, self serve cigar displays, and mail-order cigar sales;
• Ban on all flavored cigars, that are enjoyed by legal-age adults;
• Deface ornate, decorative cigar boxes, often considered an art form with grotesque images;
• Ban on cigar events where free cigars (samples) could be available to legal-age adults;
• Limits on cigar marketing and advertising;
• Imposition of new ‘user fees’ [tax] on cigars, to finance regulations;
• Limits on special release and small-batch cigars, due to mandates that cigar blends be submitted to FDA for pre-approval before release;
• Limits on nicotine levels on cigars to near zero, severely impacting the flavor of cigars;
• Ban on marketing cigar merchandise.
Your co-sponsorship of H.R. 1639 will prove instrumental in protecting the premium cigar industry and me as a cigar enthusiast!
Thank you for your support!
Last week I received this email from Senator Levin.
Dear Mr. Spiek:
�
Thank you for contacting me regarding the Traditional Cigar Manufacturing and Small Business Jobs Preservation Act of 2011 (S.1461). I appreciate hearing your thoughts on this issue. �
On August 1, 2011, Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) introduced S.1461, which would amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to exempt traditional, large and premium cigars from FDA regulation. Additionally, this legislation would waive user fees the FDA assesses on tobacco products. S.1461 has been referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions for further review. Similar legislation (H.R.1639) has been introduced in the House of Representatives and referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Thank you again for contacting me. Should this, or similar legislation, come before the full Senate, I will keep your thoughts in mind. �
�
Sincerely,
Carl Levin
It’s good to hear about the amendment that Senator Bill Nelson is presenting, and it’s nice to get a reponse from Senator Levin, but considering his history related to tobacco regulation and what others are saying about him, I’m not holding my breath when it comes to him siding with cigar lovers on this issue.
I think we all know what “I’ll keep your thoughts in mind’” translates into in political language.
A few weeks ago Google introduced a new way for people to recommend web pages to their friends. Given our commitment to helping cigar lovers find great places to enjoy cigars, we jumped all over it. You’ll now find the Google +1 button all over the site.
Recommending Cigar Bars Is Easy
If you’re looking at a page on CigarPlaces.com, just click the +1 button next to the location’s name at the top of the page. That’s about all there is to it.
After you’ve made your recommendation, you’ll be able to see it in the Google search results. More importantly, when other people search Google for cigar friendly places, they’ll see your recommendations next to the search results (like the screenshot of the Google Search Results below).
You’ll find the +1 button on other pages of the site, too. Think people would find the Chicago Cigar Friendly Places page useful? Click the +1 button at the top of it to make sure that more people know that you think it’s a good page! Think that CigarPlaces.com is just a great resource for cigar lovers in general? Click the +1 button at the top of the homepage!
Rumor has it that Google is starting to rely on social signals (like how many times people click +1 for a certain page) when it comes to ranking pages. Judging by the many places added, photos uploaded, and detailed reviews left on the map at CigarPlaces.com many of you are interested in helping to promote your favorite cigar friendly place. Clicking the +1 button at the top of their listing on CigarPlaces.com is another great way to make sure others find it and enjoy it!
Today we launched a few cool new sections on CigarPlaces.com, which hopefully prove to be useful to our international visitors. When you visit the homepage of CigarPlaces.com, you’ll now see a Cigar Friendly Places in Your Region section, right below the map. As of today, we’ve added Asia, Central America, Europe, and the Middle East. We’ll be adding more sections soon.
I’d like to give credit for these great new sections to Aleksandar Markovic, the owner of the Cigars & Professionals group on LinkedIn. A few weeks ago, Alex posted a notification on the group’s homepage asking members to add any locations that they know of in Europe, in hopes that it would make the site more useful to European cigar smokers.
The results were fantastic, with over a hundred cigar friendly locations added to the map within hours of his announcement (not only in Europe, but all over the world!). It’s great to see cigar lovers around the world help each other out by letting people know where they can sit down and enjoy a cigar.
This outpouring of support prompted the creation of a dedicated Cigar Bars in Europe section, as well as the additional international sections. Thanks again to Alex, and everyone from the LinkedIn group who continue to add their favorite places to the map for other cigar lovers to find!
I’ve said before that I think there are a lot of great cigar reviewers out there. Today I want to take a moment to give credit to a blog that I rely on to keep me up to speed on cigars that I should try.
Matt and Darren over at StraightUpCigars.com have a unique way of reviewing cigars that makes each review informative, and yet still straight-to-the-point. Their concise way of serving up reviews actually works perfectly with one of the somewhat backwards ways that I buy cigars.
I like to try a lot of different cigars, so I’m somewhat addicted to the 5-Pack Auctions at CigarBid.com. When I visit CigarBid.com, I tend to start with the list of 5-Packs being auctioned at the time, scanning through it and seeing what catches my eye. Then I’ll search StraightUpCigars.com for a review to see if it sounds like something that I’d be interested in. The reviews allow me to go through a lot of cigar information quickly, without forcing me to scan through pages of detailed information about each cigar.
Each review contains a 1-20 rating of Flavor and Taste, and 1-10 ratings of Construction, Wrapper, Worth the Price, and Would I Buy a Box. Even if you’re too rushed to read the descriptive information about the smoke, those five ratings will give you a pretty good idea of where it stands.
If you’re on Twitter, be sure to follow them to be notified of new reviews – http://twitter.com/straightupcigar.
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As a side-note, I should mention that I’m incredibly impressed with the sensory talent that many reviewers have that allow them to dissect a cigar’s flavor, the changes that occur as the cigar is smoked, and then beautifully articulate their findings in incredibly detailed posts. Although I tend to gravitate towards cigars with a more complex flavor profile, I definitely lack the ability to isolate and pick out specific notes and flavors. I’m quiet envious of those who can, and I’m grateful that some of them are willing to dedicate time to writing about the experiences so the rest of us can make educated purchase decisions.
