New York Loves Outdoor Dining. Here’s How to Keep the Romance Alive.

The rules of restaurant spaces are up for grabs as the city’s Department of Transportation looks to the future of street and sidewalk seating.

Last September, a pair of cabins the color of spaghetti sauce went up in the West Village roadbed outside the Italian American restaurant Don Angie. Along the base of each was a stripe of the same checkerboard linoleum used on the dining room floor. Each had three walls perforated by large windows whose rounded corners echoed the ones in the restaurant’s facade. Through the windows could be seen private dining booths separated by transparent floor-to-ceiling partitions. By that time, the Open Restaurants program that gave thousands of restaurants quick clearance to set up tables on streets and sidewalks was several months old. New Yorkers were used to seeing a first wave of in-street dining areas made of traffic cones, sawhorses, planter boxes and other hardware-store items. Don Angie’s cabins were different. They were forerunners of the second wave — designed with forethought, built to last beyond the warm weather and, most interesting of all, conscious of their responsibility to give the neighborhood dog-walkers and bike-riders a moment of visual joy in return for the privilege of existing on public land, in the public eye. Now a third wave of curbside dining architecture is on its way, and it’s time for New Yorkers to think about what we want from restaurants in return for letting them operate open-air dining rooms on our streets.