The Front Patio, and How to Get a Table on It
The most common question we get between May and October is not about the list or the menu. It is four words, usually asked hopefully at the host stand: can we sit outside?
Often the answer is yes. Here is how it actually works, so you can plan around it.
What it is
A handful of tables at the front of the house, set along a slatted screen with bistro chairs, under the awning. String lights overhead. It is not a separate patio bar with its own menu and its own rules. It is the same room, moved outdoors: the full cellar list, the full kitchen, the same team.
That matters more than it sounds. Plenty of places treat the patio as an overflow section with a shortened menu and slower service. Ours is not that. If you want the octopus and a bottle of Sancerre at a patio table, you can have exactly that.
When it is open
Through the warm months, and it is genuinely weather dependent. A clear evening in June is a certainty. A humid afternoon with thunderstorms in the forecast is not, and we will not set tables we are going to have to clear in a hurry.
Heaters stretch the season on either side of summer, which buys us the cool end of spring and a good stretch of autumn. Once the weather turns properly, the tables come in.
How to get one
The honest version: you cannot reserve a specific patio table in advance, and we would rather tell you that than take a booking we might not be able to honour.
What works is this. When you book a table, add a note that you would like to sit outside, or mention it when you call. We will seat you out front if the evening allows and a table is free when you arrive. On a clear Friday in July, the patio fills early and stays full, so an earlier reservation improves your odds considerably.
Walk-ins are welcome to ask too. It is worth asking.
What it is good for
An unhurried end to a warm evening, mostly. A glass of something chilled and a few plates while the light goes. It suits two people with nowhere to be far better than it suits a party of eight, which is a fair description of the whole restaurant.
It is also the easiest way to introduce someone to the place. The room inside is dark and deliberate and takes a moment to settle into. The patio is immediate. People sit down, order a glass, and understand what we are doing here before the first plate lands.
One practical note
Sunset on the North Shore in midsummer lands around 8:20 p.m., and the half hour before it is the best light the patio gets all day. If you want that, book for 7:30.
Reserve a table, mention the patio, and hope for a clear sky. That is genuinely the whole strategy.
From the Page to the Glass
Reading about it is one thing. Reserve a table and taste it for yourself.