Would You Like a Side of Exhaust with Your Dinner?
All photos: Sarah Figliozzi, Portland Bureau of Transportation
In Portland, Oregon, land of bike lanes and rhododendrons, hippies and hipsters, craft beer and barrel-aged cocktails, everything seems possible. So it’s no surprise that eaters in that great food city are taking, quite literally, to the streets.
A program called “Street Seats,” inaugurated in 2012, is reclaiming parking spaces from cars in order to plop restaurant dining tables in them, as illustrated in the above photo. (Not sidewalk dining. Street dining. You’re eating in the street.) The Oregonian reports that the program will expand to include 10 new restaurants this summer.
If any city can pull it off, it’s Portland, with its low-humidity, 70-something degree summers, roses and breezy bike rides. Look how happy this woman looks:
She’s probably got a lovely platter of free-range chicken liver mousse with crostini headed her way, or a dozen oysters. She’s in the sun, reading Proust. Life is good.
However. This same tableau, to some of us, looks like hell on earth. Some of us need to be sandwiched as carefully into the corner of a restaurant as is humanly possible. We like to be able to see the room, like Tony Soprano.
Some of us want to fully relax when we go out. The idea of digging into a platter of Pacific northwest salmon while a truck tries to squash into a space behind us, beep-beep-beep-ing all the while, would bite.
So we applaud Portlanders for what seems like a green-minded effort, we don’t want a side of gas fumes with our jam jar bourbon sour. Sidewalk dining is fine. Just don’t put us in the street.
