[Alfresco dining shelters are, in the midst of so much sadness,
shining instances of the sheer bounce of creativity on our streets;
they do what architecture ought to:solve social necessities with
improvised forms; make common design from common need.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A BRIEF ANATOMY OF OUTDOOR DINING  
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Adam Gopnik
March 20, 2021
New Yorker
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_ Alfresco dining shelters are, in the midst of so much sadness,
shining instances of the sheer bounce of creativity on our streets;
they do what architecture ought to:solve social necessities with
improvised forms; make common design from common need. _

Various types of outdoor dining architecture now line city streets,
jeannetteferrary.photoshelter.com

 

Back in the nineteen-sixties, the Museum of Modern Art held a
trailblazing exhibition called “Architecture Without Architects,”
curated by the historian Bernard Rudofsky, about “organic,” or
folk, structures, the kind we know from tree houses and pueblo
dwellings. It showed how expressive and useful and even beautiful
buildings can be when they are built from need and a living appetite
for expressive form, rather than from the slow-moving dignity of
commissions and architects. Rudofsky’s insight was reinforced by the
architect Christopher Alexander, who, in a memorable series of books,
asked us to see buildings not in terms of fixed blueprints and famous
designers but of vernacular rhythms, with self-emergent forms rising
from self-healing communities. Alexander celebrated what he called
“pattern languages” that give those who use them the ability to
create new structures. “All acts of building are governed by a
pattern language of some sort,” he insisted. “The quality without
a name appears . . . when an entire system of patterns, interdependent
at many levels, is all stable and alive.” Outdoor-dining venues were
high on his list of institutions that made people “comfortable, and
deep seated in respect for themselves.”

Well, the people of New York City have been in the improbable midst of
such a moment, as witness to, and makers of, an emergent pattern
language, reflecting something almost desperately lived—our shared
pandemic. This pattern language, of course, is the newly invented art
form of the Outdoor-Dining Shelter, which began to appear on New York
curbs in midsummer, blessedly taking over the parking spaces outside
restaurants that serviced only cars, those anti-urban engines.
Although not always strictly made without architects—various
construction firms have sprung up to fill the demand, with neatly
prefab designs—the outdoor shelters are essentially spontaneous,
improvised, and designed to fill the felt needs of the specific
restaurant, whose offspring, like some newly born calf ejected from
its mother’s body, has been thrust across the pavement from its
entrance.

Although many of us pray that this reconquest of the street for
citizens, instead of for their smoke-emitting chariots, will be
permanent, these specific shelters, built for a moment or a season,
will likely disappear, as more shots hit more arms, less contagion
spreads through fewer people, and the old dining order is restored.
Indeed, some of the outdoor-dining shelters are being dismantled
already, as restaurants start to return to indoor dining, even with
reduced numbers of guests and tables. But, as a witness to the
incredible ability of New Yorkers to do what Rudofsky and Alexander,
et al., said that architecture ought to—solve social necessities
with improvised forms, making common design from common need—the
outdoor shelters are, in the midst of so much other sadness, a shining
instance of the sheer bounce of creativity on our city streets.
Herewith, some informal notes—made as much for readers a hundred
years from now, who will wonder how this thing happened, as for those
of today—toward an Anatomy of Outdoor Dining, sourced from the Upper
Sides, West and East, and meant merely as a first draft to be filled
in with variants (dangerous word!) and local accents as they appear
throughout the city.

The outdoor-dining structure, it would seem, comes in three essential
patterns or modes—the Hut, the Shed, and the Tent—with many
hybrids and crossovers. The three modes morph into three major moods:
Let’s Pretend This Isn’t Happening; Welcome to My Dystopia; and
Baby, It Isn’t Actually Cold Outside. Their rhythm and pattern
follow, at least officially, a set of rules, laid down by the city
last summer, that are at once exhaustively and intricately
articulated—the outdoor space, for instance, has to be separate from
the normal indoor space of the restaurant—and, like so many other
rules issued by the city, effectively unenforced. Yet the challenge of
the outdoor-dining structure, underlined by all those minute
regulations, is actually simple: it has to persuasively declare itself
“outside”—ventilated, open, and discouraging to the implied, if
invisible, transmission and circulation of aerosolized sputum—while
still maintaining many qualities that one might normally associate
with, well, the tricky concept of “indoors”: heat, shelter, and
possible propinquity to others. This fiendishly intricate double
demand has been met in many ways.

The Shed is the primal form of outdoor pandemic dining: a simple
overhang made of wood or corrugated plastic, extended out over a
frame, usually with a lean-to bias, and with one side open to the
elements or, at most, covered with a transparent,
plastic-shower-curtain-like material. Tables can be set in standard
restaurant order, with tablecloths and wineglasses and napkins,
conveying a slightly surreal feel of a Buñuel film, a normal
bourgeois dining room placed right out in the cold. Most often, the
tables in the Shed are symbolically, if not efficaciously, divided by
partitions, most often of plastic or Plexiglas, that create—or,
frankly, are meant to create—an illusion of sanitary division.

The Hut is an extension of the Shed into a conscious
representation—though often only a representation, a convincing
fiction—of a more fully formed building, with doors that close and
“windows” that open. Often, too, it contains cosmetic
representations of the normal appurtenances of permanence: the Hut
looks like a tavern, or a fairy cottage, or an auberge. The Tent, by
contrast, uses flexible material—awnings and circus-like
“tops”—with ventilation and circulation as much implied as
achieved. Tents often give away their makeshift origins elsewhere—as
wedding tents, or rent-a-tents for other outdoor occasions, pressed
into service as lifeboats for this one. The Tent comes in two kinds:
essentially the adapted wedding tent, turned into a coffee shop, as at
the nicely named Utopia Diner, on Amsterdam and Seventy-second Street;
and the tournament tent, right out of “Ivanhoe,” with curlicued
tops, as it was earlier this year at Gracie Mews Diner, on
Eighty-first and First. The Tent is both the most logical of all
outdoor-dining types, the one that seems most instantly adaptable from
other purposes, and yet also the most awkward when put in place,
because the basic reality—of being sealed off inside while being
told you’re outside—is most indisputable.

The Let’s Pretend This Isn’t Happening theme can be addressed
either through a disconcertingly complete enclosure or through
extended, extravagant openness. In the upper Nineties on Madison, for
instance, you can find perhaps the most elaborate of the little
mansions of the Let’s Pretend moment, with the glorified new cottage
that the Italian restaurant Vicolina has constructed. A kind of
Italian auberge, it has a “thatched” roof and—an astonishing
touch—paper “smoke” emerging from the chimney. It is essentially
a full outdoor transfer of an indoor restaurant. (The famous
eighteenth-century Italian line about the condom, a barrier to
pleasure and an invitation to infection, does seem to apply here.) Yet
an alternative version of the same transmitted emotion—with a
radically different, indeed, opposite, structure—can be found
crosstown at the Surrealist outdoor-dining Shed of the Spaghetti
Tavern, on Amsterdam at Eightieth, which expresses an urge to
normalize by utter denial. Completely open to the elements, and
deliriously structured from whiskey barrels and tavern-like tables,
the restaurant’s outdoor structure has, of all things, a moose—the
whole damn moose—sited on top, looking south toward the Time Warner
Center. Both structures purposefully morph into the world of
fantasy—one open, one enclosed. They try to mask their temporariness
with indirection and declare themselves places of their own, just as
good as, if more whimsically inflected than, their original homes
across the pavement.

Meanwhile, the pleasing form of the Hut has been miniaturized and made
ominous by the Pod—the small Plexiglas-and-metal enclosure for
dining by two alone. This sinister little invention, the ultimate
statement of the Welcome to My Dystopia mood, can be found flourishing
on East Fifty-ninth Street, outside Bloomingdale’s—a department
store doubtless in crisis, like all the others—where the newly
installed Pods allow you to insert yourself for a two-hour lunch, in
the grand Train Bleu tradition of the place, protected both from the
elements and from the passing contamination of anyone not in your
intimate circle. That this would be 2021’s conception of dining
pleasure is hard, but essential, to believe.

A radically ideal statement of the It’s Not Cold Outside approach
can be found at a French restaurant called Jacques Brasserie, over on
East Eighty-fifth street, where each table is at once placed en plein
aire and warmed by an overhead heater. (One of the decorative elements
worth extended study is the electric cord, which can be tucked away
with Bauhaus trimness or left to dangle with rococo flourish.) Here,
not only do you have the pseudo-sanitary division of tables by
partitions but you also have, placed on every table, a pump bottle of
Purell or the equivalent.

A stroll through any New York neighborhood right now is likely to
display many instances and hybridized variants of all three kinds:
Sheds, Huts, and Tents. On a single block on the West Side, you can
find an incredibly dense coral reef of these patterns and moods. Two
almost-adjacent Thai restaurants, Senn and Land, each follow a
radically different path to serve their clients pad Thai and green
curries: one in a Tent, the other in a form of Shed morphing into a
Hut. These structures are gloriously placed near an Irish bar, the
Dead Poet, which offers no shelter from the wind or cold, more or less
directly inviting the passerby to get warm by drinking more, thus
making plain both why Irish poets are superior and why they so often
end up dead.

One truth unites these many efforts: none are content with mere
structural shelter; all use one or another kind of ornament,
undemanded by the city rules. Ornament reminds the passerby or the
visitor of the kind, the mode, and the meaning of the restaurant
temporarily transported outside: surfboards at a California
restaurant, paper-cutout piñatas at a Mexican place, the indication
of columns at a Greek diner transferred to a Tent, or the Eiffel Tower
perched precariously on the street near a French bistro. The human
appetite for ornament seems as enduring as human appetite.

At the end of a frigid anthropological exploration of the new building
type, one might recede, simply for warmth, into what is still the
greatest of all New York architectural surprises: the interior of the
old Central Savings Bank building on Seventy-third and Broadway, as
vast in feeling, and almost in height, as Grand Central Terminal, with
an unparalleled coffered ceiling borrowed from some antique church or
temple in Rome. The sudden likeness of building to building, of every
building to every other, then comes home with astounding force. To the
German immigrants who founded this improbable treasure-house, it was
the old idea of the bank as a safe place, inviolable as much for its
grandeur as for its impenetrability. For the instinctive architects of
the new shelters, the idea is one of comfort and hygiene combined. All
architecture speaks a simple double-tongued language of shelter and
symbolism; all structures, large and small, temporary and permanent,
churches and banks and coffee shops, share one pattern language. Every
building, at heart, is a shed on the sidewalk with a significantly
indicated purpose, a shelter enveloping a symbol. Whether eating or
banking, we want safety, heat, and meaning, in about equal measure. As
we pray for the persistence of this new social life on our reclaimed
streets, let us also be grateful to these temporary shelters, even as
they pass, for reminding us of this ever-warming truth.

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker
since 1986. He is the author of, most recently, “A Thousand Small
Sanities: The Moral

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