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LP restaurants eager for Cuomo to sign Sunday Brunch Bill

LAKE PLACID – The Breakfast Club, Etc. owners Susan Berkowitz and Heather LePere are counting down the days and refreshing their inboxes, eagerly awaiting the moment Gov. Andrew Cuomo signs what’s come to be known as “The Brunch Bill” – the new law that lets restaurants serve alcohol at 10 a.m. on Sundays instead of noon.

In a 2016 legislative session chock full of legislation ranging from addressing the heroin and opioid crisis to a $15 minimum wage, it’s all about the bloody marys and mimosas for The Breakfast Club, Etc., so much so that Berkowitz and LePere sent 16 letters in recent weeks to state legislators such as state Sen. Betty Little, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and one of the bill’s sponsors, Assembly Majority leader Joseph Morelle. Heastie and Morelle have kept email conversation with Berkowitz throughout the time period when the bill passed the Senate on June 16 and the Assembly on June 17.

“It means a ridiculous amount to our business,” Berkowtiz said. “We start serving at 8 a.m. in the morning every other day. We do on average, on a busy day, 150 bloody marys and mimosas on a Saturday, and then all of a sudden on a Sunday: ‘Sorry. Not till noon.'”

Berkowitz said Cuomo was supposed to sign the bill at Empire Brewing Company in Syracuse last weekend, but the ceremony was postponed. Once he does sign, Berkowitz will have 16 days until she and other booze servers across the state will be able to sell at 10 a.m. on Sundays.

“Starting at around 10 o’clock, almost every person that sits at the bar, it’s like, ‘Wait, I can’t get a bloody mary?’ It’s a lot and that’s the prime time between 10 and noon. It’s a lot of money, in the tens of thousands of dollars per year just in Sunday sales. We are super, super excited.”

When you throw in the 12 days per year the new law will allow for restaurants to start serving alcohol at 8 a.m., it’s easy to see why The Breakfast Club, Etc. is bloody bullish on The Brunch Bill. Berkowitz and LePere said they’ve already scouted out when they’d like to apply for that 8 a.m. start time. The four Sundays in July and August are likely so the restaurant can brand itself as the summer Sunday brunch destination in the area. Candidates for the four other days include New Year’s Day, the first Sunday of President’s Week and other holidays.

For other establishments in the areas such as sports bars, the bill will enable them to sell alcohol earlier on Sundays full of the pre-noon European soccer matches that have increased in popularity in recent years. The law will be ideal for National Football League broadcasts as well. One of the catalysts for the bill was a Buffalo Bills game played in London last October that began at 8:30 a.m.

Serving breakfast and lunch, The Breakfast Club, Etc. carries 10 different kinds of bloody marys, 11 different kinds of mimosas and eight other different kinds of specialty drinks.

The Brunch Bill also does several other things to modernize the state’s 80-year-old Alcoholic Beverage Control Law. The law streamlines business for members of the state’s burgeoning craft beverage industry. Craft beer producers will no longer have to complete separate applications for breweries, wineries and distilleries, in theory making it easier for a cider mill to start brewing beer or a distillery to start making wine.

Consumers will also now be able to leave wineries with open, unfinished bottles and fill up growlers at wineries, a potential boon to businesses along the Champlain Valley Wine Trail.

Great Adirondack Steak & Seafood bartender John Peters thinks the new law will help the Main Street establishment, one which doubles as a brewery, to sell more beer in growlers. Peters said each Sunday he turns away two to five people, typically vacationers looking to fill up on beer before their trip home. That’ll change.

“They come in and you tell them, ‘We can’t serve alcohol until 12 o’clock,’ and they go, ‘Oh, I forgot about that law,'” Peters said. “So, it doesn’t really bother a lot of people but I’m sure it’s going to make a lot of people happy.”

Over at Terry Robards’ Wine & Spirits on Saranac Avenue, owner Julie Robards welcomed the law with much excitement. Robards owns the wine shop with her husband Terry Robards, the author and critic who penned “The New York Times Book of Wine” in 1976.

Since Robards opened the store in 1988, he’s been a vocal activist for revising the “Blue Laws” rooted in the Prohibition era. Robards interacted with state legislators such as state Sen. Little in the past when previous alcohol-related laws were enacted, such as in 2006 when liquor and wine stores were allowed to open on Sundays if they so chose.

This year’s Brunch Bill provides changes in a similar spirit, such as allowing liquor stores to sell gift wrapping.

“I think any moves to disassemble the ridiculous Blue Laws that are holdovers from Prohibition are good and constructive,” Robards said. “As it is, we are the most overly regulated industry in the country. Every time a stupid regulation like that is dropped it’s a correct step.”

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