Toasting the new year or drowning the old? Don’t expect California’s bureaucracy to help

After a year like 2021 — the one that was supposed to be immeasurably better than the annus horribilis that preceded it — maybe you could use a drink. But you’ll have to get past the state of California first.

If a whole year of the pandemic didn’t persuade us of the value of loosening the state’s robust and often ridiculous rule book for food and beverage businesses, an unexpected additional year of COVID should have. Indoor drinking and dining is a respiratory pathogen’s playground, so making it easier for people to do so outside or at home helps them stay well while keeping our favorite restaurants, bars and manufacturers in business and employing people.

Under an emergency Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control order approved by Gov. Gavin Newsom, for example, the state’s distillers enjoyed much-needed emergency relief from a state law against shipping their liquor directly to consumers — a pointless proscription that doesn’t apply to the state’s wineries and breweries or, for that matter, prevent any Californian from getting liquor delivered from other sources. Lifting the restriction helped some craft manufacturers replace revenue that disappeared with a drop in tourism, tastings and other in-person business. The order’s impending expiration threatened to leave liquor makers in the lurch until the department issued an eleventh-hour temporary extension Thursday, but a bill to permanently legalize direct shipment has been stalled since April.

The state also appears to be losing its struggle to keep the bureaucracy at bay so that pandemic-era outdoor and to-go drinking and dining, another boon for businesses and consumers, may continue. Legislation taking effect Saturday, proposed by state Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, and signed by Newsom in October, extends a dispensation for to-go cocktails. But its journey through the Legislature and regulatory state freighted it with counterproductive conditions, among them one that shuts out many of the bars in need of relief by requiring that takeout drinks accompany a “bona fide meal.”

What, you might wonder, is a “bona fide meal”? The California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control is glad you asked.

“In evaluating this, the department generally looks at ... whether the food offered is served in a reasonable quantity and what a reasonable person might consider to be a meal consumed at breakfast, lunch or dinner,” it says. “For example, although multiple courses are not required to constitute a meal ... there should be a sufficient quantity that it would constitute a main course in a multiple-course dining experience.”

Wait, there’s more. The department goes on to note that it’s “often easier to describe what does not constitute a bona fide meal.” Such non-bona-fide meals generally include “mere offerings of sandwiches and salad,” though being an eminently reasonable regulator, it hastens to add that it “does recognize that many sandwiches and salads are substantial and can constitute legitimate meals.”

That’s not all! The department goes on to list a number of items that are going to have an even tougher time making the cut.

Among these presumed sub-meal forms of sustenance: “snacks such as pretzels, nuts, popcorn, pickles and chips”; and “food ordinarily served as appetizers or first courses, such as cheese sticks, fried calamari, chicken wings, pizza bites (as opposed to a pizza), egg rolls, pot stickers, flautas, cups of soup, and any small portion of a dish that may constitute a main course. ...”

That’s right: Takeout flautas are one thing, but a to-go margarita to wash them down? That’s anarchy.

What conceivable public interest any of this might serve is anyone’s guess. But it does present sobering proof that no one is better at parodying our vast, Prohibition-inspired alcohol bureaucracy than the bureaucracy itself.

This article was updated to reflect a temporary extension of the order allowing direct shipment by distillers.

This story was originally published December 31, 2021 at 5:00 AM.