al fresco dining

My wife makes the following observation:

"If a restaurant puts chairs outside, people will eat there. Even if it's 90 degrees outside and the indoors is presumably cooler. Even if there is road construction on Newbury St and they are jackhammering the road right out in front of the restaurant. People will sit in the chairs on the sidewalk and drink coffee and eat expensive pastries and tell themselves they're having a good time because they're eating in a "sidewalk cafe."

This can easily be written off as "people are strange" but there may be something deeper. We spent hundreds of thousands of years as humans eating outside so something deep in brains makes a positive association with food and the outdoors. Perhaps we convince ourselves that the food is fresher because we are not stuck in a cave.

I cannot claim that this is a geographical phenomenon. New Englanders suffer through long months of darkness and enclosure (and we like suffering, by gum!) so any opportunity to sit outside and do things outside is seized upon, no matter the circumstances. But, sidewalk cafes proliferate all around the world and include many cultures. There seem to be some architectural rules for al fresco dining, no matter the locale, however. Some sense of enclosure, no matter how flimsy, is usually provided between diners and pedestrians. The distance from doors or openings into the restaurant proper cannot be too far for logistical reasons and service staff often goes to some lengths to make sure that they have portable stations for flatware and the like.

An obvious complement to outdoor dining is outdoor cooking. This too taps into some primitive instinct or desire. I will contend that certain foods taste considerably better when grilled outside, but sometimes this outweighs the inconvenience associated with cooking in these circumstances.