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Ah, for a sidewalk cafe! The weather is glorious and we want nothing more than to sit in a sidewalk cafe and watch other people sitting in the sidewalk cafe or walking past.
Is this too much to ask?
In Tampa, it is.
First you need a sidewalk wide enough to accommodate a restaurant or coffee bar's overflow into the fresh air. Then you need a street where people walk.
Now we're really talking difficult.
It's astonishing, especially given our weather, that we don't realize the huge draw of eating and drinking outside. Go to San Francisco, Montreal, New York: As if by magic, the moment the temperature hits 70, or whatever the number is, tables and chairs pop up anywhere there's a square foot of sidewalk. Everyone is eating and drinking outside, so close to pedestrian traffic someone could pluck une frite off your plate.
Not here.
The tables around the fountain and at Margarita Mama's and Stump's at Channelside are outside in the sense that they're under real sky, but they're nowhere near the street. The ad campaign for Channelside emphasizes the word "Inside." That's because the complex is not visible from the outside, i.e., the street, and, in reverse, the outside is not visible from the inside.
Imagine the restaurants opening up onto the street, sitting at a sidewalk table, watching people driving and walking and, yes, riding the streetcar, on Channelside Drive. A better building design, and you could see the water from there.
Centro Ybor, too, is closed to the street, and, in effect, to the neighborhood. There's little outdoor eating and drinking, except the latter at the second-story Adobe Gila's. Centro Ybor's design capitalizes on being outdoors (they didn't put a roof on it) but not on being in an interesting part of the city. If only Centro Ybor were open to the street and the plaza were full of tables, with restaurants on street level - rather than upstairs, out of the way, when all people want is to be in the middle of things.
We're so desperate to dine al fresco, we'll eat in parking lots. The carbon monoxide at Westshore and Kennedy doesn't stop us from sitting outside at Panera. The new P. F. Chang's built an outdoor cafi off WestShore Plaza's parking lot. And any street will do. The strip center developer wisely put in a wide sidewalk with room for lots of tables at the new Pappas, and they're packing them in the first sidewalk cafe on Bay to Bay Boulevard.
Hyde Park Village was the place for sidewalk cafes when there was a lively street life there. The outdoor tables at Selena's, the Cactus Club and J. P. Winberry's were almost always full. Those restaurants have closed, two of them replaced by Mia's and the Samba Room, better restaurants, but now the energy on the street is gone.
The sidewalk cafes that feel most authentic are on Davis Islands, because there is real street life: people walking to the shops and small restaurants, bars and the ice cream parlor. It's low-key street life, but it's there. Sit at Estela's, drink a Modelo and you feel like you're in a real city.
Yet for bodies per square foot - the most people eating and drinking outside in one place - it's Bay Street. Yes, at International Plaza. Restaurants overflow onto the ersatz street, one sidewalk cafe after another: Cheesecake Factory, Profusion, Blue Martini, Gallery Eclectic Bistro, Bamboo Club, Prezzo.
Last month on a Saturday night at 9:30, the place was alive with an exclamation point. A band blasted from the packed-full Blue Martini, a jazz violinist played at Gallery Eclectic Bistro, and the Cheesecake Factory had a 25- to 40-minute wait. People were everywhere, spilling out of the mall, walking to and from the parking lot, just standing around.
So there you have it. Until Tampa gets some real street life, this will have to do: a sidewalk cafe on a street that isn't really a street but an open-air plaza in a shopping mall.
- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com City Life appears on Saturday.