Annapolis restaurant owners could soon get more breathing room on their own patios while sidewalk and street cafés stay firmly in seated-dining territory. City officials introduced legislation Monday night that would draw a sharper line between outdoor dining on public property and outdoor dining on private property, giving business owners more flexibility in the latter while keeping tighter rules in place for the former.
The proposal, detailed in a report from CBS News Baltimore, would let customers stand while eating or drinking in outdoor dining areas located on private property, treating those spaces more like the interior of a bar or restaurant. City Alderman Frank Thorp said outdoor dining in Annapolis is evolving, and explained the distinction plainly: on private property, dining areas would be treated like a bar or restaurant where people can stand, while public-property dining areas remain predominantly restricted to sitting down.
Sidewalks and Street Cafés Stay Seated
Under the plan, outdoor dining on public property — including sidewalk and street cafés — would generally need to remain predominantly seated, and capacity in those public dining areas would be tied to the number of approved seats. The proposal would also require that barriers around outdoor dining areas fit the character of the surrounding neighborhood, according to the same report.
Thorp said the goal is to balance the needs of restaurants, residents and visitors, a tension that has defined the city's outdoor dining debate for years. Annapolis Alderman Harry Huntley said the new legislation builds on outdoor dining rules the city codified in 2024, describing it as a cleanup of existing rules that could be followed by additional steps aimed at making dining easier for business owners.
Market Space and Dinner Under the Stars Excluded
Notably, the proposed outdoor dining requirements would not apply to Market Space or to Dinner Under the Stars on West Street, according to the CBS Baltimore report — carving out two of downtown's most visible dining arrangements from the new rules entirely. Huntley framed the broader push as an attempt to strike a balance between fairness for businesses and maintaining a fun, livable neighborhood.
The ordinance was introduced to the Annapolis City Council Monday night, but the council is not expected to hold a final vote at this stage of the legislative process, per the same report. That leaves plenty of room for the proposal to shift before it comes back for further consideration.
A Winding Road for Outdoor Dining Rules
Annapolis has been down this road before. The city's pandemic-era “recovery zones” program, which allowed restaurants to expand outdoor dining into street parking spaces and private lots, officially ended after 16 months when the COVID-19 state of emergency lifted, WBAL-TV reported at the time. That shutdown also ended restaurants' emergency use of street parking spaces and private lots citywide, though the station noted that five restaurants secured special leases and City Council approval to keep their outdoor dining spaces at Market Space open.
More recently, a separate CBS Baltimore report found that the joint lease covering outdoor dining for five downtown restaurants at Market Space was set to expire June 30 and would not be renewed in its current form, even as city leaders said that outdoor dining there is not going away. Instead, officials said they were working toward individual street cafe leases for each business, a transition complicated by the Annapolis Boat Shows contract for Market Space this October, ongoing City Dock resiliency construction, winter snow removal, and public safety concerns.
The city's existing framework already distinguishes between different types of outdoor setups: its parking-lot dining program covers dining in a private lot owned or leased by a restaurant and permitted only during limited times of the year, while sidewalk and street cafés are described by the City of Annapolis as permit-based dining reserved for seated patrons of the adjoining restaurant.
Eastport Brewery Shows the Stakes
The tension between flexibility and neighborhood impact has already played out at Forward Brewing in Eastport, which seats only 28 people indoors and relies on its private parking lot for outdoor dining, according to The Banner. The brewery initially applied for 89 outdoor seats before a city planner recommended cutting that number to no more than 45, and Forward later revised its request down to 77 outdoor seats. Some nearby residents have complained that the brewery's outdoor patrons take up street parking and that crowds outside can get noisy, the outlet reported — the kind of friction city officials say the new rules are meant to manage as outdoor dining keeps evolving across Annapolis.
