Add meat for beer

An absurd and arcane law designed to keep bars and restaurants separate is a confusing, abusive mess, say restaurateurs

DEAD FLESH MISSING: Cagibi
Photo by MICHEAL BEAULIEU

Want a beer with your poutine? Even if you’re in a licensed restaurant, selling you that beer could be deemed illegal.

Quebec’s booze law stipulates that establishments with restaurant liquor licenses may only sell alcohol to customers who have purchased “a meal.” Oddly enough, the high-calorie slop in front of you might not qualify as one.

So what exactly is a meal? Nobody really knows, because the legislation doesn’t actually define the term. According to François Meunier, the vice president for public and government affairs at the Association des restaurateurs du Québec (ARQ), which represents some 6,500 restaurants across Quebec, the matter is open to interpretation by the police. He says the vague standard used by police to judge what qualifies as a meal is based on a court precedent from decades ago.

The meal requirement is intended to provide municipalities with a tool for ensuring that places that are supposed to be restaurants aren’t operating as de facto bars. In Montreal, it’s common prac­tice for some restaurants to stretch the rules, selling or even giving away symbolic amounts of food to nominally satisfy the meal requirement. The practice seems to have been tolerated until recent­ly. According to people in the business, police have stepped up inspections and now expect something more substantial to satisfy the requirement. Some talk of a crackdown.

SUSHI NEEDS SAKE! François Meunier
Photo by MICHEAL BEAULIEU

BE LIKE ST-HUBERT CHICKEN

It’s one thing to go after places that are in essence bars riding a restaurant liquor licence; it’s another to go after places that are actual restaurants. The Cagibi, a licensed vegetarian café in Mile End, provides a case study in what seems to be overzealous enforcement. Despite steadfastly requiring patrons to buy food before getting a drink, co-owners Jess Lee and Mariev Robitaille have found themselves on the wrong side of the law, or at least the police’s interpretation of the law, no less than four times. In all four cases, they were busted for selling booze with vegetarian fare that was deemed not substantial enough to qualify as a meal. (Two of the infractions have been dropped and the remaining two are being contested.)

To try to prevent further infractions, Lee and Robitaille sought the police’s counsel on which items on their menu, or combinations thereof, would be considered substantial enough to fulfill the meal requirement. They faced a great deal of difficulty trying to convince the officers they consulted that many vegetarian items were in fact quite hardy. “Saint-Hubert chicken was the reference for estab­lishing what was considered substantial,” says Lee. “They kept suggesting that we should just add meat to some of the dishes and it would be fine.”

Beyond run-ins with the police, the meal requirement is also a constant source of friction with patrons. “We constantly have customers who go through the shock of having their experience con­trolled,” she says. “People are often surprised by how much we make them order.”

The ARQ’s Meunier says that his group has been lobbying the provincial government to change the rules for well over a decade. “The standards [used by police] are completely out of date, detached from the current reality,” he says. “Some nights, I just want to have a few pieces of sushi, and that’s my meal. Why can’t I have some sake with that?” He adds, “as a citizen, I demand the right to decide for myself what a meal is.”

Meunier argues the meal requirement, even if it were better defined, is not the right tool for preventing restaurants from becoming bars. Instead, the ARQ, which is currently in consultations with the Régie des alcools, des courses et des jeux, to modernize liquor licenses, proposes that sales figures be used to determine whether an establishment is operating as a restaurant or a bar. A place where food represents 60 per cent or more of sales should be considered a restaurant.

For the Cagibi, this would be preferable to the current rules. “Our food and coffee sales far exceed our booze sales, so it would work for us,” says Lee. “It’s definitely a better way of doing things with­in the current framework,” she adds.

Joyce Tremblay, a public relations representative from the Régie des alcools, says that in recent years her agency’s enforcement of the meal requirement has been relaxed. “In 2011, nobody should be getting fined for allowing a customer to have a drink with some sushi,” she says. Have the police received the message? A media relations office with the Montreal police says the Morality Squad, which enforces liquor licenses, recognizes that there is now a greater diversity in what might be considered a meal. That seems to be at odds with Cagibi’s experience.  ■

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