Today we decided to get an early dinner at our favorite restaurant, Shanghai Dumpling. Since they started doing takeouts only for Covid times, we place our weekend orders at 11am. They officially open for business at 11:30, and we arrive around 11:45 from our 40minute drive and we wait. Sometimes they don’t have our order until 12. Sometimes it takes until 12:45pm.
Pre-covid, lines out the door are common at all times of the day. An hour to an hour and a half wait was expected. Sometimes the lines would go down at 2pm, sometimes 4pm. But the next week, the trends would change (yes we’ve gone for back to back weekends often)
So today when we placed our order at 3:10 pm, we figured we’d arrive around the time the food was ready at 3:50-4:00.
However, not even halfway into the drive, I get a text at 3:30 that the food was ready. My face must have shown my hunger level because my wife immediately told me to not speed.
Luckily our food was still hot when we arrived close to 4pm. But it was clear that our prediction of the food traffic flow was incorrect.
When I picked up my order, I saw that there were a lot of orders already bagged up. Perhaps my order went in right before the next big wave of demand.
I guess when it comes down to our favorite restaurant, we should just always hope for the best and expect the worst in wait times.