Would You Dine in a Parking Space? You Can Try in Iowa City

You feed yourself and feed the meter.

Micky's Irish Pub in Iowa City is about to embark on an experiment. A dining patio built on a parking space in front of its restaurant. The patio is raised up on a platform so it's not literally in the street. 

The patio is set up, and open for business. 

On our Iowa City Patch Facebook page, followers had mixed feelings about the Micky's parking space experiment. 

i personally don't want to sit in the street and eat. the best patios are away from traffic, at least a little bit. nice of them to try something new though.

And another opposing view:

10 or so butts can definitely use this space better than one car.

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The restaurant got permission from the city to give it a try last year.

“We’re showing the city a new approach to outdoor dining,” owner Jim Mondanaro told the Gazette last year when he was first pitching it. “There is a segment of this that’s unique and hasn’t been done in Iowa City. We’ll see if it’s plausible.”

He said at the time these patios have also been used in Birmingham, MI.

Mondanaro, who owns several other eateries, is kind of like Iowa City's Albert Einstein of outdoor dining inventions.

Several years back he proposed building dining patios on planter beds outside the Saloon. These days, several other restaurants have followed suit. And, outside his Bread Garden grocery store, he has a heated patio that works in the winter or the glass doors slide open completely onto the pedestrian mall in the summer. 

So, will we see parking spaces all over town filled with patios in a few years? Time will tell.