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Chicago's recently enacted smoking ban is already returning good news: Customers love it.

Restaurants with lounges are, inexplicably, exempt until 2008 to ban smoking, but some operators aren't waiting.

Here are some of the responses:

* Signature at the 95th restaurant: "We thought we would have this tremendous negative reaction from smokers. We had just the opposite. We started getting positive letters."

* Keefer's restaurant: "The month of January we were up 17.7 percent for sales. This is awesome and I wish I had done it sooner."

* Poor Phil's restaurant: "My business changed. Sales are up 10 percent."

Read more in the Chicago Tribune.