Sen. Bill Stanley wants one key part of Virginia’s liquor law declared unconstitutional

Jarrett Dieterle, who analyzes liquor policy for R Street, a conservative think tank in Washington, calls this food-to-alcohol rule a “legal zombie” that won’t die and blames “a powerful group of established Richmond restaurateurs” for fighting periodic attempts to loosen the ratio. On the other hand, Virginia’s old fear of saloons remains very much intact. In 2015, then-Senate Minority Leader Richard Saslaw, D-Fairfax County, famously opposed a change this way: “If you can’t meet that ratio, you ain’t running a restaurant, you are running a bar. If you want saloons in Virginia, say so.” No one dares say so, although Dieterle does make the case that Virginia is missing out, culturally: “Virginians [are] shut out of the nightlife scene. There’s often nowhere they can go to enjoy venues like late-night jazz clubs or craft cocktail bars. The Virginia economy is also left out of the booming growth of the cocktail movement and remains trapped in the Prohibition Era by a few protectionist insiders.”