by Sarah Bragaw Cassell

The rest of the country barbecues, picnics, and hangs out on the porch or in the backyard.

In NYC, we just eat outside as often as the weather allows. A first warm day, then the tables and chairs are filled at Isabella's on Columbus, and Merchant's on 7th Ave. This city has "Terraces," "Patios," "Porches," "Sidewalk Cafes," and fashionable new "Restaurants in the Park."

But we like dining in gardens best.

You get the sun, the moon, and the stars, and with some luck you will get a meal worthy of the rare (at least for NYC) setting.

Eating in a garden allows you to eat in an outside environment, surrounded to varying degrees by nature YET avoiding noxious noise, fumes and other assorted urban stuff. Cocooned by a garden's walls you can concentrate on your companions and relax for a bit -- if you leave the laptop and the cellular in the coatroom, please turn your phone off. We've been to a few of the city's garden spots and, allowing for seasonal -- early, mid, and late summer -- variations here is where we think you'll enjoy the blossoms as well as the lightly dressed baby greens. Our criteria 1) walls of some sort 2) leafy green plants and flowers 3) an ambiance that combines fine dining with nos. 1&2 and 4) the optional fountains.

Fountains. Restaurants with fountains are trying for a touch of romance. Whatever style fountain is installed, the sound of running water mitigates the occasional car alarm and adds to the garden's "you are elsewhere" ambiance.

Sitting in Barbetta's garden off 46th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues, smack in the middle of midtown Manhattan, you do feel transported (transplanted) elsewhere. The restaurant's press kit promises "New York's Most Romantic Garden." That may be accurate. It's certainly one of the best known. "More the setting of a grand country estate than a city garden," Barbetta has high walls covered in plaster and foliage and a simple central cement fountain ringed by cherubs. It has been continuously owned and operated by the Maioglio family of Piedmonte, Italy, and NYC since 1906. The Maioglios also own the contiguous townhouses and their sheltered garden has century-old trees, beautiful flowering shrubs and magnificent potted gardenias. Plantings that are rich from years of loving care. The garden chairs are of heavy wrought iron painted white. The elegance of the restaurant's antique strewn "restoration" decor (the Astor family lived in one of the townhouses and rooms dating from 1874 & 1881 are available for private parties) and table settings are carried into their garden service.

Barbetta 321 West 46th Street, between 8th & 9th Aves. 212 246 9171