The restaurant waiting game.

As I said before, we eat out a lot. When deciding where to go, my top 3 questions are:

• What do I feel like/not feel like?
  
• What area is most convenient?
• What time is it?

The type of food and location are probably normal, and those of you who live in populated areas might be able to figure out where I'm going with the time thing too...

Saturday we were looking for a place to eat. It was 6pm, a borderline time for finding a restaurant with a short (or preferably non-existant) wait. The whole concept of having to wait for a table is annoying to me. I mean, if you're looking for a place to eat at 8pm on a Saturday night, you're hard pressed to find a Denny's without a wait. It's insane! ...So you wait 2 hours for a table at a decent restaurant only to get bad service because your server is as exasperated as you are with the number of hungry people packed into the restaurant tonight. The upside for them -tips. What do I get for my wait? Nothing. The same food I could have gotten Thursday night at the same price, but without the wait. I try to plan accordingly and hit "favorite" places at unpopular times, but like many people it's often easier and more relaxing to go out to nice places on the weekend. Something has to change.

Oh, right, back to Saturday night. As you can guess from the pre-rant above, we selected a restaurant (Texas Roadhouse in Joliet) and there was a wait. 50 minutes to be exact. So, we took a number, then sat down to discuss our options. In the end, Ed and Kris were starving, so we left and went to Panera Bread instead. ...but Kris never told the hostess at the Roadhouse that we were going elsewhere.

When we were finished eating at Panera I noticed that it was about 10min or so until our number would be called at Texas Roadhouse... Hmm... Ed and Kris were disappointed that we didn't go there. They've been wanting to go all week. Who else is in the same position? -It's 7 o'clock now, the wait's probably an hour and half at least. Could we sell our number to a new or recent arrival? I wonder how much someone would pay to get seated immediately? Is there a potential business selling spaces in restaurants? I, for one, would pay $5 to reduce my wait from 45min to 15min. $10 to go from 1hr to 5-10min? Hmm...