The first thing to realize about terraces is that there are different kinds, catering for different needs. In amusement parks and at festivals, for example, you may come across massive open-air stuffing facilities for beerfiends, ice-cream aficionados, french-fries guzzlers and pizza-slice munchers. We’ll leave those aside, just as the lounging oases full of sunbeds and other hedonistic gear that beach clubs set up on their decks. What we will consider, however, are the two most common types: restaurant terraces and bar terraces.
A restaurant terrace is an open top continuation of the dining room, often only slightly less lavishly appointed. It is mainly visited by groups of people that go there to eat and converse, just like inside. A good restaurant terrace is set up accordingly, with tables that are square or rectangular so that they can be pushed together with ease, to make ‘fours’, ‘sixes’, and so on. They are surrounded by solid, comfortable dining chairs, preferably without armrests, so that you don’t need the agility of a contortionist to go powder your nose halfway through the evening. A level and stable floor is a must, few things are more annoying than a wobbly table. If tables can be firmly pressed into it, gravel will do, but only in more rustic environments, where high heels don’t venture.
Intimate and amorous couples
In our parts, dining outside is largely limited to the balmy evenings of the summer vacation season – for now at least. This means that the average proportion of leisurely, intimate and amorous couples is higher on the terrace than inside, and the number of business diners and more or less formal functions is correspondingly low. Therefore, a good restaurant focuses primarily on small tables. Few people like to be forced to rub elbows with complete strangers, and trusted couples prefer to dine opposite to each other, looking each other in the eye.
Partly for this reason, the wooden benches fashionable among the catering industry are rubbish. They are uncomfortable, often too large and too deep for the petites among us. And worse: they force people on each other. The only purpose they serve is to pack as many bodies per meter as possible. It is mainly the eateries, the lower middle class of the restaurant business (the real lower class being the snack bar, of course, which rarely has a full blown terrace) that are guilty of ruining their terraces in this way.
Wistful ogling
For the lone diner, a restaurant terrace is almost as uncomfortable as the dining room itself. Perhaps even more so, since you’re in full view. That’s another reason a good terrace should have a lot of ‘twos’: Ending up at a table-for-four on your own is hardly fun, especially as the terrace gets busier and passing couples and groups soliciting a place start wistfully ogling the empty chairs you’re presiding over. On the other hand, the view from a terrace usually offers the single diner far more distraction than is available inside, where one is reduced to furtively observing the neighbors and waiters.
The terraces of bars and cafés are a different world altogether. Here, singletons set the tone: carefree or thoughtful strollers and thirsty walkers and cyclists. Bar terraces suit the mindset of guys like Andy Williams when he, in 1967, sang his delicious music to watch girls go by by. And of course, the bar terrace is an ideal setting for casual dates of every kind imaginable, from amorous trysts to business and conspiratorial ones. It’s where you can delve into your private problems with your best friend over a mint tea or a tingling glass of vinho verde. But above all it is where you can enjoy a drink and a snack on your own in peace and quiet: Read your newspaper or book or leaf through your phone in the soothing spring sun or in the cooling shade of a parasol, with nothing to do for a while except contemplating life, people-watching and letting the hustle and bustle of the world pass you by.
Conspiratorial solidarity
These are all somewhat intimate activities. So paradoxically, a good, attractive bar terrace is completely open, while offering a high degree of privacy, or at least suggesting it. Here, those ‘cosy’ wooden (or, worse, plastic!) benches are even less desirable than on restaurant terraces. They are only suitable for seating inveterate smokers from ‘inside’. Locked-out smokers seek each other’s company, they experience a kind of conspiratorial solidarity. Those sturdy benches fit their sense of making a heroic last stand against a hostile non-smoking world, but they ruin any semblance of intimate privacy on a terrace. Even more unsuitable are long tables with ditto benches on each side, German Oktoberfest style. They should be exclusively confined to the rustic-collectivist beer garden, with its alcoholic singalong and conga-line horrors. More than anything, this is what the true denizens of the bar terrace do not want. They want to be able to ignore everything and everyone around them, while observing all. Terrace life is a relaxed form of hiding in plain sight. You are exposed, for all to see, and at the same time you’re not there.
Alone on a terrace, you’d rather not be stared at by a reproachfully empty dining room chair on the other end of your table. That is why on a good bar terrace the chairs are light and small, often a bit Thonet-like in appearance. They are also not arranged under the tables, but loosely around them. A bar terrace table is not the center of activity, as in a restaurant. Instead, it is an anchor point, a buoy to accommodate your drink. Therefore, on the ideal terrace the tables are small and circular, so that there is no head. Such tables are easy to move, and both visitors and staff can navigate between them without difficulty or bruising. And – and this is important – chairs can be easily moved from one table to another, so that loners, couples and larger groups can always easily find a spot and add to their number, or conversely.
Light and flexible
Everything here, from the mood to the furniture, is light and flexible. Here, people who come in pairs prefer to sit more or less next to one another on either side of their anchor point, with their backs to the bar. Those who want to have an intimate conversation slide closer together around their table. They sit at an angle, but rarely, if ever, directly across from each other. They still wish to continue to exude a certain nonchalance, a kind of noncommittal levity. That is also why unaccompanied guests hardly ever really sit behind a table, but more or less to its side.
Those little terrace tables are of course uncovered and preferably made of metal, so that they dry quickly after a squall and can be cleaned in one wipe if a glass has been spilled. But most important are the chairs. A real classic are metal seats without armrests, possibly with a seat of wooden slats so that they won’t collect water. However, colonian style wicker or rattan armchairs are also pleasant and attractive. Plastic usually doesn’t sit as well, will get sweaty and can stick nastily to bare thighs.
If you have a terrace or if you’re thinking of acquiring one, meet these basic conditions and, provided the sun does its bit, your terrace is guaranteed to fill up with all sorts of happily contented folk, ready to order.
