Dining Outside in Santiago, Chile

Photo by mabahamo on Flickr.

While in the southern hemisphere, temperatures are still a little cool for your best outdoor dining options, in Santiago, we have been having a bit of a warm snap on occasion. If you happen to catch one, and you’re looking for a place to sit outside and eat, you’d be hard-pressed to beat Patio Bellavista.

The Patio is a small “mall-type” walled establishment, but the food is far from your typical foodcourt fare. There’s pizza and sushi (of course), but also an Irish pub, Peruvian food, Middle Eastern and many other options, all of which offer outdoor dining in a pleasant, well-lit (if artificial) plaza just steps from the Baquedano metro.

What makes sitting outside in Patio Bellavista more pleasant than some other options is that traffic tends to be quite loud, and sidewalk setbacks are often not really deep enough to pull you away from the zooming traffic in much of the rest of Santiago (unless you’re lucky enough to sit on a rooftop deck, post forthcoming). Also, since it’s a place where many restaurants come together, it’s a great place to people watch, and in the warmer months there are often concerts, live music, dance and other performances. There’s a splashy fountain in the Patio as well, which means you can’t necessarily hear the conversation of the people across the way, and there’s a pleasant acoustic buzz while you eat.

The Patio brings attracts both tourists and locals, and it’s a fabulous place to go for the dreaded dead Sunday night when it seems everything in the city is closed for dinner. The Patio (almost) never sleeps.