»In which we might eat outside

One of my long-standing complaints about San Francisco is its paucity of outdoors seating. Few cafés have tables on the sidewalks (and few sidewalks are broad enough to pleasantly accommodate this scheme); few restaurants have outdoor areas with table service. Too often the outdoors seating is like Squat and Gobble on Fillmore street: untidily arranged against a shopfront and facing a loud, stinking avenue. Even Zuni has to contend with derelicts and the odour of the city's failure to keep itself clean.
Ross Mirkarimi is introducing legislation to allow more businesses to provide outdoor seating: this could perhaps be one of the few topics on which he and I agree. Ross: now if we could get the "medical" dispensaries to follow some sort of licencing process, and if we could get the better ones to have outdoors seating too, everything* would be peachy.

* "everything" does not include everything. We still suffer shootings, stabbings, graffiti, so much graffiti, and the ubiquitous trash and filth. I would rather rid of neighbourhood of those than have swells supping on the sidewalk, but one takes what one can get, I suppose.