Al fresco restaurants, from Paris to Portofino
Dining indoors in summer is rather like making love with your clothes on. The sheer pleasure of enjoying good food, wine, and company in a more casual setting increases while dining al fresco. The warmth of the sun, the cool breezes, and the way the light changes and softens as the meal goes on creates layers of moods you just don’t get in a staid indoor dining room atmosphere.
For reasons that are as cultural as they are panoramic, dining al fresco in Europe is different from eating outdoors in America. At least one of the distinctions is that Europeans still believe that a more casual setting does not mean lesser food. Too often in the U.S. the outdoor section of a restaurant has a completely different menu, with lighter, cold options built around soups, salads, and sandwiches. In Europe people think nothing of having a fine meal that shows off the true talents and individuality of the chef and the establishment. Maybe a glass of Champagne and some wine too.
See our slideshow of Europe's Best Outdoor Dining .
Why would anyone order a salad or hamburger at a sunny seafood restaurant like Park Fora overlooking the Bosphorus in Istanbul? Indeed, the setting often determines the kind of food served, so that an al fresco enoteca such as Cul de Sac near Rome’s Piazza Navona encourages a hearty plate of spaghetti alla carbonara and a glass of wine, from 14,000 selections. And then a nap.
Paris almost seems to have been created around the idea of the outdoor café. As soon as spring greets the city, the wicker chairs are placed outside, the tablecloths are draped, and all the pale people come to enjoy the sunshine. What sense is there, after all, in eating a Caesar salad in an outdoor café like the famous La Rotonde on Montparnasse in Paris? This was one of the places Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and others of the “Lost Generation” made famous in the '20s, and it still serves the same fondly remembered bistro dishes like steak au poivre and rich, cheese-topped onion soup. The Pudlo Paris Guide 2007-2008 says that the Tafanel brothers have brought the cuisine to a higher level than it’s had in years, and an outdoor table puts you right in the spirit of the Left Bank.
One of the best places, both for its spectacular setting and its award-winning cuisine, is the Summer Restaurant at Le Bristol Hotel on the fashionable Rue duFaubourg St Honoré. The terrace is canopied, the outdoor tables on the green lawn have white chairs and umbrellas, impeccable service, and a menu that has won Chef Eric Frechon two Michelin stars. This is a place of high chic, of course, and the food is haute cuisine, but Paris teems with bistros and cafes, not least the Café de la Paix in full view of the magnificent Place de l’Opéra. Emile Zola dined here and Enrico Caruso drew cartoons on the napkins. As Daniel Young writes in his book "The Paris Café Cookbook," “At least as many great romantic dramas were played out on the long café terrace as there were sung in arias on the stage of its magnificent place de l’Opéra neighbor, the Palais Garnier.”
'Al fresco' is, of course, an Italian phrase, and Italy is blessed with such natural beauty along its rippling seashores that nearly every restaurant in regions like Liguria, Puglia, the Veneto and Campania sets its tables out in the sunshine in good weather. I know of nowhere more beautiful in this regard than La Terrazza ristorante at Il Splendido Hotel, perched high above the fishing village of Portofino. But what a fishing village!—filled with mega-yachts and the homes of the Dolce and Gabbana designers and Giorgio Armani. Il Splendido has played host to everyone from Orson Welles and Ava Gardner to Larry King and Rod Stewart, who was married here last spring.
So, too, to know the height of grandeur is to sit at an outdoor table on the Grand Canal at The Gritti Palace’s Club del Doge in Venice—where Ernest Hemingway and, more recently, Monica Bellucci, have dined—and watch the waters lap the dock as the vaporettos glide by as you feast on the freshest fish from the Rialto market. As Somerset Maugham observed, "There are few things in life more pleasant than to sit on the terrace of the Gritti when the sun about to set bathes in lovely colour the Salute [church]."
See our slideshow of Europe's Best Outdoor Dining .
The equally mesmerizing waters of the Bosphorus that flow through Istanbul are the setting for the wonderful, two-year-old Ajia Hotel. Located on the Asia side of the city, the hotel’s Italian restaurant has a unique view of the minarets and hillsides of the European side, and when the moon is a crescent, the stars appear, and you hear the evening prayers ululated from the mosques: The experience of dining here can make you gasp.
And if you are anywhere in Bavaria, but particularly in Munich, it is essential to eat out at one of the beer gardens where the city’s vitality truly shines. The Chinesischer Turm is as famous for its oompah bands as for its curious Chinese pagoda architecture. This is supposed to be the largest beer garden in Germany, and it is always thronged with people feasting on hearty German food and steins of beer—even, weather permitting, in the winter.
Sometimes the simplest pleasures of an outdoor table can count among the most memorable in European cities. One of the best meals I had in Lisbon was at a very modest restaurant called Bom Jardim, which Lisboans know as "Rei do Frango" (King of Chickens) for the platter of fabulous spit-roasted chicken with fried potatoes that has been served here forever. A veteran concierge at the Lapa Palace Hotel said his grandmother used to take him to Bom Jardim as a Sunday treat and it was still one of the most beloved restaurants in Lisbon.
Sitting outside under an umbrella, just off a main thoroughfare of pedestrians, eating perfectly roasted chicken and fried potatoes with my fingers, I didn’t want to be anywhere else in Portugal. The warm breeze carried up the street, the umbrella fluttered, and the Sagres beer was cold and golden, just like the afternoon itself.