Mediterranean food in Preston: outside tables and where they fit

A format whose selling point is the pavement, in a city where the pavement is narrow and the weather is not on its side.

Mediterranean restaurants sell an idea of eating outside, and in Preston that runs into two local facts: the pavements in the older streets are narrow, and the number of evenings warm enough to use them is small. What the trade does about that is the interesting part of this category.

The answer is frontage. A unit with a wide front and a stretch of pavement in front of it can put tables out on the evenings that allow it and lose nothing on the evenings that do not, because the inside works on its own. A unit without that stretch is selling the idea and cannot deliver it.

Where the wide frontages are

Preston's remodelled central streets are the answer, because the remodelling widened the footways. That work was done for pedestrian movement and it had a side effect nobody was aiming at: it created the only stretch in the city where a restaurant can hold a licensed pavement area of any size.

The consequence is that this category is concentrated in a very short run of streets, and that its position there is a matter of geometry rather than of fashion. Where the footway narrows, the format stops.

The half of the year that does not cooperate

A Lancashire spring is not a Mediterranean one, and any restaurant here that depends on outside covers for its margin would fail.

For a visitor that means the category reads differently in June and in November, and that the June version is not what is on offer for most of the year. The plan-your-visit sheet covers the seasonal picture across the city.

Not the same question as tapas

Searches for this category and for tapas overlap heavily and the two are different things: one names a region, the other names a way of serving. A Mediterranean restaurant in Preston is usually full-service with plated courses, and a small-plates room is usually not Mediterranean at all.

The rest of the city-centre evening trade, including the mid-market chain band that sits in the same streets, is on the world cuisine sheet.

A pavement is not the restaurant's to use

The tables outside a restaurant stand on the public highway, and putting them there needs a permission from the highway authority rather than a decision by the business. The permission is granted for a defined area, it has conditions about the width left clear for pedestrians, and it can be refused where the footway is too narrow. That is the mechanism behind the geography above.

It also means the outside area is a fixed asset rather than something a restaurant can extend on a good evening. Where you see a small licensed area on a wide pavement, the size is the permission and not the ambition, and the business inside was planned around it.

A format the climate rations

Outside tables are not decoration for this trade, they are floor space, and in Lancashire they are available for perhaps five months of the year. A restaurant that plans its covers around a pavement is carrying the rent of a full year on the trade of half of it, which is why the format concentrates in the few places where the frontage is wide enough to matter and the passing trade is heavy enough to fill it twice over in the season.

The consequence for a visitor is a category that changes shape between May and October. The same address that reads as a busy terrace in July is a room with a closed door in February, and neither state says anything about the business. It is the format doing what the format does in this latitude.