Palo Alto's Taverna to expand next door

I was very pleased to be told that with the closing of St Mike's Annex, St Mike's Alley (a block up on Homer Ave) plan to expand their menu and hours to include breakfast/brunch.

As a person who has a parent in a wheelchair, I find it intolerable that Taverna has set up the outside seating without thinking or obviously complying with ADA requirements. Don't get me wrong, I love outside dining. But they've taken it too far

Totally agree with Disabled. Their tables take almost the entire sidewalk. But aside from this being a violation, I simply don't get it from a customer perspective. Why would you pay quite an amount of money for literally eating on a sidewalk? Pedestrians pass you by, some cough, some sneeze, your food is exposed to car gases, etc. that are just a yard or so away from you. Yikes ...

How much housing will the restaurant provide? What about the increased traffic that will come with more seating? How will the owners mitigate that???

Visit Europe some time. Restaurants do that everywhere and people love it.

Even in Mountain View. And Menlo Park, and other peninsula towns.

@Disabled has a good point in that the City does not enforce at all, accept on a complaint basis, the idea that restaurants should be paying for sidewalk space, thereby squandering hundreds of thousands per year for the public coffers; we are essentially underwriting the landlords by giving them the sidewalks for free.

if we enforced the sidewalk rules, the ADA stuff would be included, obviously.