It was late Sunday afternoon, and on TVs up and down Hanover Street in the North End, Italy was trying to outshoot England for the Euro 2020 championship. A street away, a waiter named Justin Lepore, was battling adversaries of his own.
His restaurant, La Famiglia Giorgio’s, is one of several on Salem and Prince streets in the challenging position of having their outdoor dining set-ups in parking spaces across the street, meaning Lepore has to cross a lane of Boston drivers to bring diners their chicken piccata.
“Thank you sir, I’m not burning my hands,” he said sarcastically to a motorist behind a tinted window, who neither slowed nor seemed to notice the slim man poised on the curb, hot pizza trays turning his fingers red.
“Hey, I’m walking here,” Lepore called out later to a similarly oblivious passing Mini Cooper driver, as he balanced three enormous plates of pasta.
Greater Boston — once too buttoned-up to dine al fresco — has gone mad for outdoor dining. Parking spaces, alleys, driveways, the sidewalk in front of a UPS store. Wherever you look, food is being served.
The explosion started in June 2020 — when Governor Charlie Baker announced the start of Phase 2 of the state’s reopening plan — but often in a thrown-together way. Eager to bring in diners quickly, restaurant owners did what they could. They threw down Astroturf, rented jersey barriers and didn’t decorate them, schlepped indoor furniture outside every day and then back in again.
But this summer it’s a veritable patio-palooza. Owners are spending serious money — tens of thousands of dollars in some cases — to build structures so stylish they could be part of a Lin-Manuel Miranda stage set. The city is alive with beautiful string lights, lush plantings, cabana-style curtains even.
On many streets, where meter maids once presided, waiters now recite specials.
In South Boston, landscape architect Michael D’Angelo usually works on high-end homes and commercial real estate projects. Now, he’s designing parklets.
At Gray’s Hall, on East Broadway, he used ipe, a tropical hardwood, for the decking and exterior cladding. At The Broadway, he carried the industrial look inside the restaurant right out to its patio.
The goal is to make the space feel both open — and enclosed. “You want people to feel like they’re in a Parisian cafe,” he said. “Not on East Broadway.”
In Dorchester, Chesterfield Coppin, the owner of Oasis, a Caribbean and soul food restaurant, is working to transform his little curbside stretch of busy Hancock Street into a tropical paradise, complete with (imitation) palm trees, coconuts, and a beach mural.
“I want it to be a destination,” he said cheerfully.
It took a flatbed truck to deliver restaurateur Philip Frattaroli’s patio decor, surprisingly pretty recycled aggregate blocks that weigh 4,000 pounds each. More typically used for retaining walls, they now ring the parklets in front of his Ducali and Lucia restaurants in the North End.
“It looks like the Medici palace in Florence,” he said.
In New York City, where even the convenience stores have outdoor dining and owners protect their investments overnight with steel security grates, three nonprofits recently launched the Alfresco Awards to recognize the city’s best outdoor dining spaces and open streets.
We don’t have awards here, but the change in the outdoor dining scene has been stunning, said Bob Luz, president of the Massachusetts Restaurant Association. Pre-pandemic, 81 percent of restaurants did not have a patio, and the patios that did exist were typically small, he said, a situation he attributed to the “parochial nature” of the state when it came to alcohol.
“There was a longstanding nervousness about allowing the consumption of adult beverages outdoors.”
But the pandemic has prompted big changes, captured in a June Globe headline. “Baker signs bill extending pandemic-era policies, including to-go cocktails, expanded outdoor dining.”
The law allows restaurants to sell to-go beer, wine, and cocktails through May 1, 2022, and extends the time towns and cities could allow for expanded outdoor dining at restaurants — which had been slated to end in mid-August — until April 1, 2022, the Globe reported.
In Boston, as part of its 2021 Outdoor Dining Pilot Program, the city has granted 556 restaurants outdoor dining permits, according to the Boston Transportation Department.
Of those, 315 restaurants have set up parklets in the parking lane/roadway, according to the BTD. The city doesn’t have statistics on the number of spots each restaurant is using. In the North End, which has some 90 restaurants, according to state Representative Aaron Michlewitz, more than 300 spaces have been converted.
All this outdoor dining is not perfect. Retailers, customers, folks getting take-out, and neighbors don’t like losing parking spots. (In the North End, free or reduced garage parking has been offered to eligible residents, but tensions, Michlewitz said, remain.) Staffing shortages can make serving the additional customers a serious challenge. July’s horrible weather has also taken a toll.
Outdoor dining can also pose problems for people with mobility issues. A fact sheet put out by the state details requirements of an establishment’s obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
But technically meeting requirements is not always the same as providing the same experience, said Claire Bergstresser, a fellow with the Disability Law Center and rising second-year student at Northeastern University School of Law, who uses a manual wheelchair.
In some places, for example, restaurant staff have to put down a ramp so she can access a parklet that has not been made flush with the curb. “Psychologically all of a sudden this is a big deal,” she said. “There is this tense situation where I just want to be able to roll up to a table and sit down.”
Sidewalks congested with diners waiting to sit down, or strollers parked next to tables but in the public passageway, make getting around harder, she added. “The issue for someone like me is the unawareness of a different kind of body going down the street.”
Then, of course, there is the pressure to create an outdoor space that will meet diners expectations. In the North End, Jen Royle, chef-owner of Table, has what can be called an emotional relationship with her $10,000 patio.
She loves being able to seat an additional 44 people. But the pressure to buy, plant, and keep alive the flowers and greenery that a high-end restaurant patio requires is stressing her, and her 74-year-old mother, as are rained-out customers who don’t understand she doesn’t control the weather.
“This patio is going to be the death of me,” she said after a wind storm blew parts of it down on a recent weeknight.
But, at a time when even the most casual eateries have put out chairs, if she doesn’t offer an outside option, she said, “diners will go somewhere else.”
Beth Teitell can be reached at beth.teitell@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @bethteitell.
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