Outdoor dining isn’t pleasant or civilised or romantic. It’s pure hell, says Griff Rhys Jones. If only his friends agreed…

Am I alone in this? Of course. I am the problem. I have logic. Everybody else is mad… We roll up to a pub. It’s a cold day in May. The place is famously cosy. It has a print above the warming fire. The room was used as an advertisement for pipe tobacco as far back as 1932. That’s how sweet it was then. And now it has added patina and nice grime.

“What a great room within which to sit and have luncheon.”

But the people with me don’t want that. No, spring is here and they want to eat outside. They point to a row of uncomfortable, splinter-prone, rough-hewn Asda-bought, lumpen, cheap timber lash-ups, smelling of creosote, with benches bolted on so that a Chinese child gymnast would have difficulty getting sat, and they plonk themselves down.

It’s a car park. An asphalt lot. And it’s cold. This isn’t al fresco dining. It isn’t even al freddo dining. It’s utter delusion.

After bits of cutlery have fallen through the spaced planking, after the laminated menu has flown away in a squall, after napkins have fluttered out to sea, after people on the next table have started smoking like Port Talbot, after I have carted an assortment of ketchup-smeared plates and half-drunk coffee onto an empty table and tripped over a dog lead, after a dismal pattering sound indicates a storm is lurching in, someone says, “This is nice, isn’t it?” and suggests I go inside to order the food.

Since I lost both my buttocks in an accident called old-age, I like upholstery. I don’t want to lunch on a bench. Some people have a bucket list. I have a fucket list. I’m done with a number of inane, enjoyable things forever. Stadium rock. After-dinner speaking. Going backstage. Superhero fighting-and-angst films. Night clubs. The Edinburgh Festival.

I did them. You do them, please. Just don’t tell me I’ll “love” standing in a pub with floor tiles stuck to my shoes fending off resentful teenage comedians. Eating outside is right up there with attending film premieres. (Or, oh my God, awards ceremonies – even if you win. Especially if you win.)

If I say “life’s too short”, this is not a tired cliché, I really mean it. I have to measure my years out as if terminal now, and my remaining time shouldn’t involve suffering frozen fingers and waiting forever to be served, at huge personal expense.

Behold central London – officially the most polluted fresh-air in Europe. Green mania seems to have made Oxford Street the home of every clapped-out taxi, gunning, belching delivery van, particle-vomiting bus and choking construction lorry in Britannia.

But I live with diseased romantics. Sometimes I have to eat with them too. “Oh, let’s go on the terrace!” Lah di bloody dah. They imagine birdsong but get a scrofulous pigeon instead. The only place for a pigeon is on a plate, butchered and dressed with a dark fruit sauce. Not poking around between your toes.

It seems beyond credibility that outside dining grew in popularity in central London for “health reasons” during the late pandemic. It’s simply dangerous. The single space heater, rolled into place, grills you on one side and leaves the rest unrendered fat. If it’s sunny (is it ever?) any beam of light which pierces the smog of particulate matter will bounce off the white crockery and glaring white table cloth to blind you.

Mind you, it’s always sunny in blasted Italy. There you have to eat outside, apparently. You just have to! Otherwise you’re some form of lower order. Only insensitive brutes would want to have a Tuscan lunch in that dark and shadowy interior where the knowledgeable local gourmands sit. That’s what I want! Abuse me, I don’t care. We can get back to balmy breezes after the tiramisu.

What, after all, are the pleasures of eating at a restaurant? Company you can hear. An absence of planes flying three feet overhead. Hot food, that is actually cleared away when finished. Attentive waiters. Warmth.

Outside, in the gale, there’s no restraint. People can shout, holler and screech as much as they want. Like the ones on the next table now, self-satisfiedly whooping like a demented US sitcom audience.

Outside, the piercing, teeth-rattling shriek of a big motorbike takes off your skull. Inside it’s a mere passing growl. Outside, your sharing plate is mainly shared with angry wasps.

Don’t you see? You have things the wasps want because you’re on the wasps’ patch. I find this particular annoyance makes eating outside more than painful – it makes it utterly bloody intolerable.

When you finally decide to go inside to get the bill you’re lucky if the restaurant hasn’t been turned back into a bank. It’s been that long. “I’m the man who’s been waiting outside for you to bring the bill. My companions have all expired, by the way.”

But you don’t have to sit outside a pub or restaurant to experience the horrors of outdoor eating. How about a picnic? How about waving a soggy paper plate of messy chicken about while pins-and-needles paralyse your right leg because you haven’t assumed the cross-legged position since infant school?

And how about the drink that won’t balance on the rough surface under the tartan blanket? Don’t forget that. And the Tupperware box full of gooey salad made two days ago. Fantastic. And the passing dogs. And the bottles of wine that topple over. And the children screeching.

There’s only one way to eat outside. Get a strong table, a good light, a cloth and cutlery, and then build brick walls and a roof with sealed windows around it. I like a comfortable, expensive, airless, still, napery-bedecked, quiet, sheltered, be-walled, roofed, sealed restaurant environment, thank you.

What was it George Kaufman said of the inattentive waiter who died? “God finally caught his eye.”

If God had been eating outside, that waiter would still be alive.

This article appears in the new edition of the Idler, No 96 May/June 2024 – out now.

Our May/June 2024 issue is available in Waitrose, Waterstones, Smiths Travel outlets, select Smiths high street branches and around 100 indie stores. Click here for your nearest stockist.