Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Plenty of people I know are eating indoors at restaurants again, but I’m still too Covid-phobic. I want to support restaurants by doing takeout, but I am not going to take off a mask indoors unless I know that everyone in the building is triple vaccinated.

One innovation during the pandemic has been the tent for outdoor dining. Although some of those tents look too enclosed for your faithful hypochondriac, I thought it was interesting to read what Carolina A. Miranda had to say at the Los Angeles Times about their evolution.

She wrote, “Over the course of the last year, I’ve eaten enchiladas in a party tent. I’ve gotten COVID-tested in a party tent. I spent a night dancing to house music in a party tent. I’ve seen party tents double as retail shops, church naves, gymnasiums and outdoor living rooms. …

“Last year, as the pandemic isolated us into our respective domestic cocoons, designers took to their AutoCAD to imagine a brave new world of design ‘solutions’ for the pandemic. These included wearable head-to-thigh social distancing shields and space-age cones [But] we’ve learned infinitely more about how to rethink the design of our buildings from the pandemic’s most prominent workhorse: the party tent. …

“It can be staked into soil or anchored on pavement. The simplest models, a standard canopy, can shield you from the sun; more protective ones come with collapsible walls that can be adapted to the weather as needed. …

“The party tent is symbolic of all the other improvised architectures that have arisen during the pandemic: the parking lots turned into eating spaces with twinkle lights and umbrellas; the wooden dining platforms crafted out of plywood and two-by-fours; the izakaya on La Brea whose collapsible walls are actually transparent shower curtains. In Echo Park, Misty Mansouri, the owner of the Lady Byrd Café, has turned an impractical triangle of concrete on her property into an al fresco dining room courtesy of an ebullient agglomeration of Christmas trees and portable greenhouses employed as individual dining pods.

“Temporary structures can even be found in hyper-glam iterations — like the space-age, vented dining pod at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in Beverly Hills. A 6,500-square-foot modular dining room constructed in the middle of Canon Drive, it was created by VX Design Solutions, a custom fabrication studio, and Choura, an event production company, and was assembled in less than a week. That structure opened in March 2021 and is still going strong. ‘We fill it up every single day,’ says Steve Scott Springer, the restaurant’s general manager.

“Party tents may not be around for the long haul, but they have qualities that are worth integrating into the hardscape of our cities. They offer flexibility and permeability and serve as a reminder that in the mild Southern California climate we don’t always need to encase ourselves in hermetically sealed cells of HVAC. If well-building design issues such as fresh air and sunlight had been gaining currency before the pandemic, COVID-19 and its many variants have made it a matter of urgency.

“ ‘Being able to kick open the doors makes people who are inside those doors feel so much better,’ says architect Oonagh Ryan, founding principal of ORA, an L.A.-based studio that has worked extensively in the commercial and hospitality sectors. ‘And operable windows, those are key.’

“One of ORA’s most recent projects is the design of Agnes, a popular Pasadena comfort food outpost that also contains a cheese shop. Housed in a 1920s stable once employed by the Pasadena fire department, the bulk of the restaurant’s design was conceived before COVID, but a number of programmatic choices made since the pandemic began have helped make the space more resilient.

“The key is flexibility. The street-facing side has operable windows and the rear of the dining room has sliding doors that can be propped open to connect with a patio out back, drawing fresh air through the building. A private dining room likewise opens to the elements. The patio, which harbors additional seating, is protected by a weatherproof canopy that can be pulled back when the weather is mild. It’s an outdoor space that can be used come rain or come shine. And the furniture isn’t fixed, so it can be reconfigured into different densities. …

“When the restaurant opened in June, the surge of COVID-19 infections had tapered off and indoor dining had resumed. But the pandemic made the coming months wildly uncertain, meaning that the design needed to be responsive to shifting health directives. ‘If the pandemic was still going strong,’ Ryan says, ‘we had a plan for how we could rearrange everything into more retail.’ ”

“If the pandemic was still going strong.” Is it? Who knows?

You get several free articles at the LA Times, here, if you’re not a subscriber. I think you will enjoy the variety of party tents in the photos.