Riojan hospitality industry attacks the street tastings of San Bernabé

This Friday, the Riojana Hospitality Association has been very critical of the tastings and other types of street hospitality establishments that have been set up during the recently concluded San Bernabé de Logroño festivities and have demanded a regulation “for everyone the same.” The request derives from the inspections and sanctions carried out on hospitality establishments on holidays.

As the president of the association, integrated into the FER, Francisco Martínez-Bergés, has stated, “the inspections are carried out on the same people as always, they are 0.016 percent of the complaints, but we are the ones who are inspected, and it must be like that, but we can take charge of what happens in our premises, with posters or helping in some way, and we cannot take charge of what happens later on the street.

Something, he pointed out, “is the responsibility of the City Council, the Government Delegation and the Police.” “Because, for example, we cannot take glasses out onto the street, because they report us, but then we see people drinking with plastic cups at the tastings that take place on the street and nothing happens,” he added.

Martínez-Bergés has been very critical precisely of the regulation of tastings or festive markets in which food and drink are served, “which do not have any inspection, and we have from the City Council, Tourism or Health”, while, in On holidays, “people come from outside who start, especially in the Old Town, to sell products in any way.”

«Then – he added – you see that they are roasting a pig in the middle of the street, with a huge table with plastic cups, and that they charge in a cardboard box, or that in one day there are 14 or 16 tastings. “We are not against tastings, although I do not understand that there is an hour and a half queue for a roast potato, or that a tasting is set up on Tuesday at the door of a bar.”

To this he has added other shortcomings, such as the lack of public bathrooms, “any open door should have them, or the City Council should have public bathrooms on the street, if this were the case, there would not be hundreds of complaints for urinating in the street.” “We want nothing more than to be the same as everyone else, for everything to be regulated,” she stated.

Likewise, he pointed out that “it is terrible that we have to have everything in order and that then there are people in the street competing, you can’t demand a lot from some and nothing from others”, clarifying that “we don’t want them to take away the tastings.” “But we want them to be regulated.”

“Do not hang banners”

In addition, he has asked “not to hang warnings” on the sector due to noise problems and other incidents in the streets, as has been reported in recent weeks by neighborhood groups in the Old Town of Logroño, because “the one who has to control that is the City Council and Government Delegation.

The vice president of the Riojan Hostelería, Fernando Elías, has insisted on this idea, for whom “there is a certain manipulation” in the neighborhood complaints of recent times, “with videos that certain groups are publishing with a certain intention” but that, in his words, “They do not correspond to reality.”

«The bars in Laurel or San Juan have certain hours, 90-something percent close by 12 at night, what cannot be is that then there are stores, which we all know what they are, that are open all night and They sell alcohol all night. “Don’t let those who don’t belong to us be punished,” he noted.

In his words, “everything has to be put in its proper measure, it is not every day, if you go yesterday, for example, there was nothing” and he has demanded “more police control, because if this type of thing happens at certain times “It is because there is not this control that we have been demanding for ten years now.”

«We put up signs or guides, but we don’t have more strength, we can’t act on the street. “Who has to do it – he has stressed – is the City Council and Government Delegation.”