So, I’m in Salt Lake City for a conference (nice town by the way). It’s my first stay in Salt Lake City and I’m here for two days, working hard and playing…very little. As I picked up my registration packet upon arriving at the venue, the beautiful Grand America, I immediately noticed some interesting information about alcohol consumption I should be aware of as an attendee of the conference.
1) Alcohol beverage service in a licensed restaurant requires that:
- You order food with your drink (can you say side of chips and salsa with after-dinner drinks?)
- Your beverage be delivered to your table or at a counter by a waiter
- You consume your drink at or near your table or counter
2) Limitation on number of drinks:
- Each attendee may have no more than one spirituous liquor drink before the patron at one time (more on this in a bit)
- Other than spirituous liquor, attendee may have no more than two alcoholic beverages at any time before them (sic)
What??! If you’re a road warrior like me and attend tons of conferences, you know that the ‘reward’ at the end of the day is a visit to the nearest bar to commiserate about the long hours with some of your cohorts. These limitations put a serious damper on the evening fun (nice town by the way).
Took an associate to dinner last night and we both ordered a well-deserved round of Stellas prior to our meal. I also ordered a decent glass of California Cabernet to enjoy with my steak. When the waiter brought my wine, he actually waited for me to drink my last swallow of beer prior to pouring my wine. State law! The poor guy actually said to me, as he was holding back the wine, “you’re not from Utah, are you?” and went into a well-practiced apology about not being able to put down the wine before he could pick the beer glass (nice town by the way).
And I thought my home-state of New Jersey was off by not letting me LEGALLY order wine online from a non-NJ vendor. More to come from my next conference in LAS VEGAS, where I don’t think my blog entry name will be “Drinkless in Las Vegas”.
Utah liquor laws are bad, but not that bad, and they have been slowly getting better. If you read the second bullet under number 2 in the rules you quoted, you will see that you server was wrong. While he could not give you wine if you had a cocktail in front of you, he could have given you wine with your beer still on the table.
One of the weirdest laws (that was recently changed) was that in a restaurant cocktails had to be mixed behind a partition so that seeing them made would not corrupt children. All that shakin’ goin’ on! More on our laws here:
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-8584-Salt-Lake-City-Cocktails-Examiner~y2009m7d4-Will-new-liquor-laws-move-Utahs-reputation-into-the-twentyfirst-century