Lex Eats Local: Rooftop Dining at 105 Degrees
Wepa Cafe’s rooftop patio seats 25 in Garden City. (Credit Lex Nelson)
Years ago, I worked as a host at a popular Boise restaurant — and every summer, I both craved and dreaded patio season.
On one hand, it was an opportunity to escape the restaurant’s familiar bustle: the blue-white glow of my computer screen, the same playlist on an endless loop, and the incessant ringing of the host stand phone. In my patio dreams, there was a light breeze shifting through the umbrellas and I had plenty of downtime for people watching.
On the other hand, this was Boise, Idaho in high summer. On the hottest lunch and dinner shifts the sun pounded on my bare head and droplets of sweat slid between my shoulder blades, camouflaged by the black polyester of my button-down. I chugged water and escaped inside for bathroom breaks in the AC.
Looking back, I was luckier than the servers, bussers and hosts who work Boise’s patios today. On Aug. 17, our city tied a nearly 20-year-old record when we reached 20 days of triple-digit heat in a single year. On Aug. 24, we went to 21 days and broke it.
The Hottest of the Hot
Out of all of the outdoor dining options, a rooftop restaurant is perhaps the sweatiest. Scientific American reports rooftop temperatures are often higher than the “actual air temperature” because of their direct sun exposure. To find out how local rooftop restaurants are handling the second year in a row of record-breaking heat, I spoke to representatives from three of them.
Shade, Fan, Mist, Repeat
At the upscale American restaurant Crave Kitchen and Bar in Eagle, co-owner Derek Hood said diners cool down with help from rooftop shade sails and misters. Thoroughly misted, they can devour elote ribs with a view of the nearby pond and mountains. Staff also have a modified dress code that includes shorts and short-sleeved polos to help them beat the heat.
At Wepa Cafe in Garden City, guests stay cool on the third-floor patio thanks to sail shades, canopies and misting fans. Owner Art Robinson modeled the Puerto Rican eatery’s rooftop after La Vergüenza Puertorrican Chinchorro, one of his favorite restaurants in Old San Juan. He said the vertical shades on Wepa’s western exposure have been a game changer.
“We have five tables upstairs, and before I was lucky to keep one table in the shade during [dinner] hours. Now I can keep four out of five tables shaded,” Robinson said.
Reef, an island-style nightlife spot in downtown Boise, relies on palapas (thatched tiki roofs), movable umbrellas, the shade of nearby buildings, misters, and “really cold drinks” to keep diners cool, according to Manager Chris Taylor. The restaurant prioritizes wooden seating and recently invested in special “heat reflective” chairs. With a drink in your hand and live music playing, Taylor said you may “feel that you’re not in some place like Boise, Idaho.”
Reef’s rooftop is a party, even on 100-degree nights. (Credit Tyler Elmore)
A Constant Juggling Act
When heat strikes, the biggest challenge of the rooftop model is staffing. Crave calls off servers if a 100-plus degree day is forecast, and if a reservation can’t be moved inside, the guests may have to find somewhere else to eat dinner. (Hood said diners are warned about this possibility if they ask for a table on the patio, and reservations are only available for parties of eight or more.) Neither Wepa nor Reef take patio reservations. At Reef, management uses years of software data to predict how busy the patio will be on any given night, and schedules staff with those past numbers in mind.
How Hot Is Too Hot?
“The heat definitely prevents us from opening on some nights. If it gets over 100 degrees we don't open the rooftop,” said Hood. He added that even with misters, 100 degrees still feels hot on Crave’s roof—and when the mercury reaches triple digits, diners simply aren’t in the right headspace to eat outdoors. “ ... We just learned that [100 degrees] is kind of our threshold.”
Like Crave, Wepa will close the rooftop for dinner if the weather is forecast at over 100 degrees, although it may stay open for lunch on Saturdays and Sundays before temperatures climb.
The staff is still finding its groove with the 25-seat rooftop, which opened July 1.
At Reef, Taylor said that on days in the upper 90s and above, “99% of people do not want to be outside eating in the heat.” And yet, Reef keeps the rooftop open for that stubborn 1%.
“Even as we’re talking right now I’ve seen a couple groups of people go out there,” he told me in the late afternoon on a 99-degree day. “ ... It can be 100 degrees, and if there’s a little bit of cloud cover mixed with the umbrellas, that actually helps lower the heat a little bit.”
By the dinner hour, Taylor said, there’s enough shade on Reef’s rooftop that diners are willing to trade a bit of discomfort for the thrill of a tiki experience.
‘If You Build It … ’
As I sat down to write this story, my phone vibrated with a message from the reservation booking website OpenTable. The email header read, “These warm temps won’t stick around forever … ” and the message inside cheerfully instructed me: “Carpe dining this summer by booking your way through the Diners’ Choice: Outdoor Dining list — a roundup of the most popular patios, gardens, and rooftops in Boise.” The day’s high was 97 degrees.
Did OpenTable know that less than 24 hours ago, I was lounging on a restaurant patio, dewy with the spray of an overhead mister? Maybe it did. Or maybe its marketing team has simply come to the same conclusion I have about people living in Boise: We are high mountain desert folk who live by the “Field of Dreams” rule.
If the patios, lawns, and rooftops will have us — then by God, we will come.
Did you miss last month’s “Lex Eats Local”? Read it here.
This story was originally published by Boise Weekly. Read the original here.