Most places where I am in California have outdoor seating options, but it’s more common to have it behind the restaurant in a little courtyard than in front right next to the street.
While I generally agree with the sentiment, the distinction is if there's outside seating it's either a park, or owned by a restaurant. It's not like the blend of the street, sidewalk, businesses you see in Europe
The kind if mixed use, areas that are walkable, have seating, various kinds of shops... usually only in a few districts of a few fairly large towns or large cities.
There is seating, sometimes, in like... restaurants in basically a strip mall type set up... but they're like islands, surrounded by acres of parking lots.
All the way up and down the West Coast, multiple times, over the course of more than 2 decades of being driving age... from Bellingham WA down to LA / San Diego... many, many places in between... also many places all the way out to South Dakota via I 90.
If I gave you a full list, I'd have to rewrite Johnny Cash's "I've been everywhere"... I've actually been to a good number of places in the original lyrics.
Fire codes prevent it in NA for a large part. Building have specific occupancy limits, and having booted down seats has exceptions for more space than loose chairs, and businesses usually want the capability of having the largest revenue, so most seats.
Now this also applies outside as those would have to be part of their property. In most cities restaurants and the sort they are built right to their property limits, or they incorporate a patio with set seating.
So if you do see it, it’s not movable furniture, but an actual area. Now along one of our drivable Aves they’ve made compromises, picture below, I don’t hate the solution, but it’s obviously not ideal and hard to accommodate wheelchairs.
They’ve allowed sidewalks to be patios, and let some road space be made into the “sidewalk”, but it’s not a perfect solution, especially when it starts snowing.
I think it’s a joke about people sitting outside at cafes in Europe?
I’ve heard this is a thing a lot of Americans find weird but I’m American and it’s not weird at all to me, we do literally the same thing here (at least in my home state)