The Best Places on the Water's Edge

"Waterfront" on a menu usually means a road between you and the water. These ten are actually on it — a veranda over the river, a terrace above a weir, a palace with its own stretch of strait, a plastic table on the sand.

The Thames gets three. In Limehouse, The Grapes is one room wide and has a small veranda out over the water at the back; a mile upriver, the Prospect of Whitby has one of the best river terraces in London. Upstream of Oxford, The Trout has stood on a bend of the river by Godstow Lock since at least the 17th century, with peacocks in the garden and terrace tables above the weir.

The Godolphin in Marazion, Cornwall, is a Victorian seafront hotel and pub whose terrace and most of whose rooms look straight across the bay to St Michael's Mount. In Istanbul, Çırağan is Sultan Abdülaziz's 1860s palace on the Bosphorus, gutted by fire in 1910, rebuilt, and now the only hotel in the city with its own stretch of the strait. Fretheim Fjordhytter are traditional cabins on the shore of the Aurlandsfjord, a short walk from Flåm's harbour.

Two are on the Gulf and cost almost nothing. Bu Qtair started as a fishermen's hut on the beach at Umm Suqeim and still runs like one, with plastic tables by the water. Al Dhafra, on Abu Dhabi's corniche, piles grilled whole fish and rice onto tables for local families.

Finland closes the list. Ravintola Nokka holds a Michelin Green Star and cooks over open fire in an old harbour warehouse in Helsinki's Katajanokka. Haikko Manor, a 19th-century manor house turned hotel, spa and restaurant, sits in a waterside park just outside Porvoo's old town.