Outdoor Dining Options Leaves Restaurant Owners and Managers Hopeful

By AJ Norwood and Justin Claas
Journalism Students

Oxford restaurants such as The Blind Pig and Proud Larry’s are looking to make their outdoor seating areas permanent. However, they have a lot of hoops to jump through with the city in order to make that happen.

The owner of Proud Larry’s, Scott Caradine, says that the city thinks these outdoor seating options are a good thing, but some remodeling needs to be done in order for this to take place.

 “Their plan is to keep them year-round, but they want to make them permanent and they want them to look nice,” Scott said.

The Blind Pig is a restaurant that didn’t originally offer an outdoor seating experience. Despite this, manager David Moore says that this is something that the Blind Pig has always been interested in pursuing.

“We have been really eager to invest in our outdoor dining to make it more worthy of the Square,” Moore said.

While these restaurants are still making plans to improve their outdoor dining experience, the city officials have not made a final decision on what to do. Caradine says that this is something that he hopes they can continue in the future to satisfy their customers.

“We hope they make it permanent,” Caradine said. “We look forward to them making something permanent here so we can use it because we like it. Our customers like it.”