Summertime—When the (Outdoor) Dining Is Easy

Haddonfield is no Paris—no City of Lights, no fresh baguettes on every corner.

But there is a bit of burgeoning Gallic charm in the borough’s café street life, depending on the day’s temperatures.

On Kings Highway and Haddon Avenue, you can see some folks sitting out in front of dining establishments enjoying a sandwich or coffee with a book or a laptop.

Lee Langmuir, a special-ed teacher from Medford, recently paged through a newspaper outside . She was meeting her boyfriend, who works at Archer & Greiner, a law firm on East Euclid. It’s just down the street from Jersey Java.

On a beautiful day with low humidity, Langmuir was soaking up some rays and fresh air.

“I love being outside,” she said. “I was inside cleaning all morning. It’s time to be outside in the gorgeous weather. I can’t pass this up.”

South Jerseyans, of course, can be a fair weather bunch. A week earlier, on a day it was so humid you could’ve steamed asparagus in your bicycle basket,  Jersey Java’s customers were inside, enjoying the refreshing air conditioning.

“I prefer to be outside, but it’s too uncomfortable,” said Victoria Kouba, whose family owns the coffeehouse.

Most days, she said, people love sitting outside on the new patio. Kouba spent time in Italy not long ago, and there, people sit out no matter what the weather, she said.

She ought to visit Seattle.

My daughter and son-in-law live in Washington state’s biggest city, and there are two things there you can’t help but notice—the coffee culture and the weather. (Seattleites often dress oddly, like the 60s never ended, but that’s a story for another time.)

Summer is lovely in Seattle, sunny and warm but not too hot, but in winter, when it’s not so much bitterly cold as it is in the Northeast but cool and damp, you will see folks sitting out in coats and hats sipping their espressos. (Should you go to Seattle, regular coffee is typically referred to as “drip.”)

In late March, I spent a long weekend in Austin. One of the biggest pleasures of that trip was hanging out at a place called Uncle Billy’s.

Picture a big outdoor deck, with live country/indie music, craft beer and waitresses in cowboy boots. Oh, and some of the best beef brisket in the Lone Star state.

The whole experience was the definition of laid back.

I have relatives in Tucson, AZ. Everywhere you look there are gorgeous mountain vistas, but I would never sit outside in summer to eat so much as a taco. Temperatures in Phoenix reached a scorching 118 degrees the other day.

In that heat, aridity doesn’t help. Ovens set to 500 degrees are dry, too.

But nobody in southern Arizona gets too excited when the mercury climbs. Now, in this region, when it gets very hot or very cold, very wet or very dry, the weather folks on TV go nuts, detailing catastrophes to come.

The next time the temperatures escalate dramatically in Haddonfield, we should take a page from Tucsonans.

In the Sonoran desert, they have two words to describe Hades.

They simply say: “It’s warm.”