Central Maine Newspapers
The Native Conservative
January 26, 2011
778 words
Beer and Bathrooms
Beer and pizza go together like, well, pizza and beer.
Except at Kennebec Pizza in Hallowell, where the only beer on the menu is root. The beer police have struck again.
Steve Deptula owns two pizza restaurants and a micro-brewery in Brooklyn, New York. And he loves Maine where he spends a lot of time at his lakeshore home in Belgrade. Driving through Hallowell a few years ago, he liked the looks of the place and decided to buy a Main Street building. Recently, he opened a pizza place in his building.
He expected it to be simple. He would offer just four or five types of pizza and two micro-brews – his own from Brooklyn and one made in Maine. He renovated his building, built a gorgeous wood-fired brick oven inside an old vault, put in his taps, set up tables and 20 seats, and constructed a large handicapped-accessible bathroom.
He was inspected and detected by all the proper authorities, with the liquor inspector arriving last. Steve had already discovered that he couldn’t bring his own beer to Maine without going through a distributor. That was set up and ready to go.
But he went wrong – terribly wrong – with the bathroom. “You can’t serve beer,” he was told by the liquor inspector, “because you’ve got only one bathroom.” The rules of the Maine Human Services Department require two bathrooms – one for men and another for women - for commercial establishments that serve beer, no matter how small or how few seats the facility offers.
Apparently it’s not about building capacity, it’s about your capacity to hold your beer. So I asked an expert for the science.
Dr. Brian Jumper, past president of the Maine Urologists Association and the Maine Medical Association, stepped out between surgeries to discuss this pressing issue with me.
The average person generates 2 ounces of urine an hour and will have the urge to urinate every four hours. Beer accelerates that process, but there is no science that tells us how quickly you’ll have to pee after enjoying a beer with your pizza. There are too many variables. We do know that salty pizza helps you retain fluid. So perhaps you could enjoy two beers with Steve’s delicious pizza and still go from the restaurant without having to go.
It would also help if you arrived at the restaurant somewhat dehydrated. Don’t drink before you drink.
Certain that Maine’s Human Services Department’s concern for our peeing pleasure would treat all businesses and products fairly, I turned my attention to coffee. Establishments that serve coffee, it turns out, are not required to have two bathrooms.
Dr. Jumper says that coffee and beer are both diuretics that affect us equally. That Big Gulp of coffee will go through you at the same pace as an equal measure of beer (justifying perhaps the breakfast stout instead of coffee).
You could argue that if you pick up that coffee in the drive-through, you should be required to have a bathroom in your vehicle. Certainly, coffee shops ought to provide the same immediate relief as restaurants that serve beer.
While researching this topic, I heard a concern that women needed their own bathroom because men pee on the seat. Message received, and I’ll try to be uplifting in the future.
Dr. Jumper concluded that this two-bathroom requirement makes no sense, diuretically speaking. The rule doesn’t pass the “sniff test,” reported Jumper.
I tried to calculate the bathroom capacity needed in a 20 seat restaurant, on a pee per hour basis. Dr. Jumper says it takes 40 seconds to 2 minutes to urinate, based on a number of variables including whether you sit or stand and have a zipper or buttons. Let’s go with the longest estimate of 2 minutes. That would give 30 patrons the opportunity to commune in Steve’s bathroom every hour.
I spent a busy lunchtime hour at Kennebec Pizza one day and kept a keen eye on the bathroom, waiting for a line to develop. In that hour, the only bathroom entrant was Steve Deptula, who stepped inside so I could take his photo. That’s right, no one used the bathroom.
But aren’t we glad that state government is anticipating and meeting our need to pee.
Steve could apply for a bottle club license, so his patrons could bring their own beer. Only one bathroom required for that. Don’t even try to find the logic in this.
I’ve come up with a better solution than a bottle club to reunite beer and pizza at Kennebec Pizza: one bathroom, two holes. Bring back the old Maine standby two holer. One hole reserved for men, one for women.
Add to skirt: A restaurant review of Kennebec Pizza can be found on George’s website.