Smoking bans tend to stick to a pattern in their media coverage. Bars and restaurants kick up a storm with dire predictions of economic disaster. They offer a series of “compromises” that generally amount to creating a “no pissing” section of the swimming pool, and then the ban either passes or it doesn’t.

Off to phase two. Bartenders, restaurant owners and smoking patrons get clipped griping about civil liberties and the nanny state, threatening defiance and predicting dire economic consequences (along with the rise of some kind of fitness-based Fourth Reich, in the case of the more foam-flecked types). This lasts a week or two.

And then phase three: nothing. The story vanishes for a year or two, and then… the inevitable follow-up on how the world failed to end.

Thus the New York Times story featuring one of the most out-spoken opponents of that city’s smoking ban, James McBratney, president of the Staten Island Restaurant and Tavern Association:

He frequently ripped Mr. Bloomberg as a billionaire dictator with a prohibitionist streak that would undo small businesses like his bar and his restaurant. Visions of customers streaming to the legally smoke-filled pubs of New Jersey kept him awake at night.

Asked last week what he thought of the now two-year-old ban, Mr. McBratney sounded changed. “I have to admit,” he said sheepishly, “I’ve seen no falloff in business in either establishment.” He went on to describe what he once considered unimaginable: Customers actually seem to like it, and so does he….

Employment in restaurants and bars, one indicator of the city’s service economy, has risen slightly since the ban went into effect, as has the number of restaurant permits requested and held, according to city records, although those increases could be attributed in part to several factors, including a general improvement in the city’s economy.

City health inspectors report that 98 percent of bars and restaurants are in compliance with the rules, though some critics question those statistics. Wrath at Mr. Bloomberg, at least pertaining to the smoking ban, seems to be abating.

There are still those cursing the ban as an affront to their civil liberties, and some bar and restaurant owners say that it has undoubtedly caused a decline in business. City officials say they doubt that contention, pointing to data from the first year of the ban showing that restaurant and bar tax receipts were up 8.7 percent over the previous year’s. They said they were still waiting for more detailed and current data from the state.

But a vast majority of bar and restaurant patrons interviewed last week, including self-described hard-core smokers, said they were surprised to find themselves pleased with cleaner air, cheaper dry-cleaning bills and a new social order created by the ban.