If beauty is in the eye of the beholder — if one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor — how exactly might zoning laws be written to split the difference fairly?
During the waning days of Prague’s communist era, and for a few years shortly thereafter, I always made it a point when visiting to cross the Charles Bridge to the oldest part of the city on the castle side of the Vltava, and begin sniffing my way to a certain hospoda (a tavern, or pub, usually specializing in beer).
At the time I had this route memorized, although the name of the establishment now eludes me. The point is that one needed only get somewhat close to it, especially in summer, when the smell of its pivní sýr (beer cheese) would guide seekers like me home.
Shall we posit “pungent” and “aggressive” as suitable adjectives to describe the olfactory sensation?
The beer cheese was aromatic and delicious, fitting hand in glove with the typically wonderful Czech pilsner-style beer. Ingredients included stinky mild cheese (Olomoucké tvarůžky, Maršovský, or Jarošovský, among others), paprika, caraway seeds, maybe a bit of onion and garlic, with everything mashed together to make the cheese spreadable on rye bread with butter and a few dabs of mustard.
My sampling may have been small, but (a) platter after platter of beer cheese kept coming out from the back of the hospoda; (b) leftovers or doggy bags were entirely unheard of; and (c) the fact that the “odor” drifted through the neighborhood was widely regarded as an appetizing and brilliant marketing strategy, not something to be avoided, banned or shunned.
Meanwhile, returning to present times and the American genius for kill-joy, me-first griping, this article at Eater Portland (Oregon): A Portland Vietnamese Restaurant Has Closed Because a Neighbor Kept Complaining About the Smell, by editor If you don’t like the smell of cooking food, maybe don’t live near a restaurant?”
A Fremont Vietnamese restaurant has closed its doors due to a neighbor’s complaints about the restaurant’s smell. Pho Gabo, which operates three locations in the Portland area, has closed its Fremont and Northeast 73rd location indefinitely due to “the city’s and the neighborhood’s complaints about the smell of the food that we grill and the foods that we serve customers,” according to a sign posted to the restaurant’s door.
Willamette Week reports that the restaurant has been hit with complaints since September 2022, five years after the restaurant opened. A presumed neighbor has been filing complaints with the city about “odors” from the restaurant around lunch and dinner hours. Identified simply as “COM” in public documents, the neighbor alleged that the restaurant was violating zoning code which prohibits “continuous, frequent, or repetitive odors” that could impact residential neighbors.
There’s no pay wall, so please click the link and read Jackson-Glidden’s whole story. The editor contributes this stellar bit of editorializing, to which I’ve added my own italics.
Portland’s national — or even international — reputation is tied to its food and beverage industry. We are known for our restaurants, particularly our Southeast Asian restaurants. The idea that a neighbor could essentially pester a business owner out of his location using city officials and fines sets a horrific precedent, one that does not bode well for Portland’s restaurants. The fact that zoning violations can be determined based on the subjectivity of smell, which can be influenced by racial or xenophobic bias, opens up countless potential inequities: Who gets to determine what kind of odor is offensive? Would this neighbor complain about the smells from a bakery or a pizzeria — both located within a few blocks of Pho Gabo — in the same way?
This subjectivity of a sniff test suggests a final, brief digression.
Beer cheese in Prague isn’t the only example of one nose augmenting maps. Often when roaming a European neighborhood on foot (or settled into a bicycle saddle) in search of a brewery to visit, we’d catch a whiff of the boil in progress, distinctive and somewhat akin to that of baking. These were the times we ecstatically high-fived, knowing we’d likely enjoy beer samples in a tasting room redolent with the aroma of how those liquid samples came to be.
However, later on multiple occasions at both of NABC’s breweries, there’d be people who’d come in during a boil in progress and bolt straight from the gate, before saying “hello”, to “I love your beer BUT omigod what’s that awful smell?”
I was never sure whether to feel pity, or just tell them to leave and provide directions to the nearest McDonald’s.
It never gets any better in life than knowing how the game is played, although those who never bother learning the rules do indeed make life difficult for the remainder of us. Best wishes to Pho Gabo’s owner Eddie Dong; I hope the complainer’s issue is simple cluelessness, as opposed to a simpleton’s overt racism.
Photo credit: KATU News.
