Students looking to blow off steam as the semester heats up will again be able to do so worry free at Chelsea’s Cafe. The local eatery and popular late-night locale — which was cited for operating as a bar without the proper licensing after a January raid — is back to business since an act clarifying the legal definition of a restaurant was signed into law by Gov. Bobby Jindal and came into effect this month.After the Jan. 22 raid, Chelsea’s Owner Dave Remmetter was charged with a $2,000 fine and a one-year suspension of his license unless he met the state’s conditions to rezone or applied for a parish restaurant license, according to Daily Reveille reports.”The state representatives and the senators felt a big push from this injustice,” Remmetter said. “I just don’t think people liked the idea of the [Louisiana Office of Tobacco and Alcohol Control] coming in and trying to shut us down.”Chelsea’s now has a late-night menu including hamburgers, grilled cheese sandwiches and appetizers, Remmetter said. “It actually put into the law what had been practiced by restaurants all across the state,” said Tom Weatherly, chief of staff for the Louisiana Restaurant Association. “We weren’t trying to break new ground or create new law here, we were really trying to qualify what has been existing practice.”Murphy Painter, ATC commissioner, said restaurants are required to sell more food than alcohol on a monthly basis, and the ATC is in the process of determining how those figures will be monitored.”It still says that the legislative intent is for the main purpose of restaurants is to take uncooked food, prepare it and serve it for food consumption on the premise,” Painter said. “It does allow entertainment, which it did before.”If a restaurant is not selling more food than alcohol on a monthly basis, they are in violation of the law, Painter said. Lydia Jackson, Louisiana State senator and author of the bill, said her goal in writing the bill before the 2009 legislative session was to quantify the long-standing practice in the restaurant business of deriving 50 percent or more of its sales from food.”It provides a degree of certainty for restaurant owners to operate,” Jackson said. “We expect that a restaurant, the primary purpose of their being is to serve and cook food and the [act] makes that perfectly clear.”Many restaurants are seeing problems because of the economic downturn, Painter said. “Most of it has to do at this particular time with the downturn in the economy, and a lot fewer people are eating out than before,” Painter said. “That’s why laws change or adjust it to reflect those things.”The LRA began working on the bill in response to a letter issued by the ATC in January that said “legitimate restaurants” could not have drink specials, live performances or cover charges, Weatherly said. LRA, which represents about 7,500 restaurants, was working to clarify “standard practice” in the restaurant industry.”[Painter] was basically interpreting the law in one direction, and we thought that it should be interpreted in another,” Weatherly said. “[Painter] said that we would actually have to change the law.”While Remmetter said business has been normal since the legal issues came to the end, he said the restaurant will definitely benefit from University students returning to Baton Rouge.”I’ll be glad when the students get back; it is certainly a surge in our business when LSU is back in full swing,” he said.—-Contact Lindsey Meaux at [email protected]