Sea and summer offer an unbeatable combination for outdoor dining. Newport has the sea, and it’s now summer, but the City by the Sea’s potential as a charming host of sidewalk café society has yet to be realized.

That’s not to say that Newport lacks fresh-air dining experiences. Check out the West Deck on Waite’s Wharf. Bowen’s Wharf has loads of outdoor tables, including at the venerable Black Pearl. And there’s the Mooring Restaurant on Sayer’s Wharf.

But note that the above named restaurants are all on wharves. Wharves have the double advantage of having water views and being wide spaces. The lack of ample room out front helps explain the paucity of sidewalk cafés elsewhere in Newport.

Let’s face it. Most of downtown Newport was laid out in the colonial era, when narrow streets and skimpy sidewalks were the norm. Walk along Thames Street, and you’ll find a few good-sized dining decks (or perhaps more accurately, drinking decks) attached to relatively recent construction, but rare is the restaurant in an old-fashioned storefront with more than a few tiny tables outside.

Two locations in Newport do offer ideal settings for sidewalk cafés but don’t have them. One is Washington Square, which is in line for a rehabilitation project that will include new asphalt on the roadway, a historic-looking traffic light and, we expect, wider sidewalks. A sidewalk café outside of Yesterday’s, for examples, would be a natural.

Indeed, Washington Square could host a long stretch of adjoining outdoor cafés. It’s been done in downtown Columbus, Ohio, which has a lot less fine architecture to work with. Washington Square offers two advantages for sidewalk dining. One, it isn’t heavily trafficked. Two, it offers a fine eyeful — a landscaped European-style square with the 18th Century Old Colony House at the head.

Another fine place for sidewalk cafés would be the nearby Long Wharf Mall. Once a barren pedestrian walkway bordered by storefronts with hideous asphalt-tiled fake-mansard roofs, Long Wharf Mall has undergone a wonderful makeover. The structures have been redone with a Main Street look. Remove the concrete planters in the center of the wide pedestrian walkway (or at least put something in them besides cigarette butts) and you have an ideal environment for outdoor cafés. And as with the al fresco experience on wildly successful De Pasquale Square, on Providence’s Federal Hill, dining on the Long Wharf Mall would be separated from vehicular traffic.

We’ve left out one other reason for the scarcity of sidewalk cafés in Newport, and that is the weather. Given the, well, bracing climate for some of the year, outdoor dining can’t be a very big element in most Newport restaurants’ business plans. But summer and good chunks of spring and fall offer glorious temperatures for outdoor dining. Where a sidewalk café can be done, Newport should go for it.