Entertaining guests while they wait: here's how to do it in your restaurant

Between taking the order and the moment the plate lands on the table, most places have ten to twenty minutes go by. On a quiet Tuesday nobody notices. On a packed Saturday night, or at a table with two impatient children, that quarter of an hour decides how the rest of the evening feels.

The annoying thing is that as a business owner, you can do little about it. The kitchen doesn't work faster just because it's busy. What you do have control over is what a guest has to do during that time. And in practice, that makes more difference than the waiting time itself.

Why waiting feels longer than it is

Research on queues keeps coming back to the same conclusion: unoccupied time feels longer than occupied time. Someone waiting ten minutes with nothing to do consistently overestimates that time. Someone who has something to do during those same ten minutes rates it as shorter than it actually was.

For a restaurant that means something practical. You don't need to shorten the waiting time to make it feel shorter. You just need to fill it.

There's something else at play too. Waiting at the start of a visit weighs heavier than waiting in the middle. Someone who has just sat down has no reason yet to think things will be fine; someone who has already finished a starter waits with confidence. That's exactly why an amuse-bouche or a piece of bread is so effective: it's not the food that helps, it's the signal that something is happening.

The three moments where it goes wrong

In practice, almost every complaint about waiting comes from one of these three:

1. Between sitting down and the order being taken. The shortest gap, but it weighs the heaviest, because this is where the guest forms their first judgement.
2. Between ordering and the first dish. The longest gap and the only one where the guest genuinely has nothing to do.
3. Between clearing the main course and the bill. Commercially the most valuable moment, and at the same time the quietest.

This article is about the second gap, but keep the third in mind: that's where money is made or not. More on that in the article about revenue per table.

The first impression of a visit sits more often in the first ten minutes than in the first plate.

Six methods that work in practice

1. Something on the table that does something right away

A small bowl of olives, a piece of bread, an amuse-bouche from the house. Small, cheap, and it turns the moment of waiting into the start of the meal. It works mainly because it's a signal: someone is thinking of you.

2. A colouring page or puzzle booklet for children

The classic, and not without reason. The downside is known to everyone who does it: pencils go missing, paper ends up on the floor afterwards, and you have to keep restocking it. Reckon on five to ten minutes of attention per child.

3. Games on the table via a QR code

The version without loose material lying around. Every table gets its own QR code; the guest scans with their own phone and plays right away in the browser, no app needed. A round takes two to five minutes, exactly the length of the gap you want to fill. At TablePlay, guests can play alone, together on one phone, or take on another table in the venue. See all the games available.

4. Starting a conversation instead of asking a question

"Is everything to your liking?" always gets "yes, fine" as an answer. "Have you been here before?" or "is this a special occasion?" gets a conversation going, and a conversation makes the waiting feel shorter without costing anything.

5. Giving them something to look at

An open kitchen, a wood-fired oven, a display case with today's fish. Someone who has something to watch doesn't get bored. This is the most expensive of the six options, but also the only one that works permanently.

6. Being honest about the waiting time

"It'll take about twenty minutes today" does more than you'd think. Uncertainty about how long something will take weighs heavier than the duration itself. A guest who knows what to expect waits more calmly.

It differs per type of venue

Restaurant with a kitchen that runs on time

Here the waiting time is predictable: ten to twenty minutes, every evening again. That's the easiest situation to fill, because you know exactly how much time you need to bridge. Choose something that can be finished within that time, so it doesn't get interrupted halfway by the food arriving.

Café where people stay seated for a long time

At a café it's not about a gap between two dishes but about the evening itself. What works here is something that can be repeated and has a competitive element. Table against table or a regular quiz night fit better than a short puzzle.

Venue with lots of families

The waiting time weighs heaviest here, because children have a shorter attention span than the kitchen has speed. What matters here is variety: something that's still different after the third time. See also what parents really look for in a restaurant.

Hotel or holiday park

Guests here more often sit through several evenings in a row, and that changes the requirement: what's fun on night one must still work on night three. Repetition is the pitfall. See the page for hotels.

What it brings in

Filling waiting time isn't a goal in itself. It's about what happens afterwards:

• Guests stay seated longer, and those who stay longer are more likely to order something else.
• The rating of the visit goes up without anything changing about the food.
• Staff get some breathing room: less impatience at the table means fewer interruptions during the rush.
• Families are more likely to come back to a venue where the children had a good time.

How you know it's working

There's a strong temptation to judge this on gut feeling, and gut feeling is unreliable here: a busy evening always feels good. Four numbers do tell you something, provided you compare the same days of the week with each other.

1. The average spend per table, broken down by day of the week.
2. The share of tables that order something else after the main course.
3. The average time a table is occupied. Longer is good here, as long as you don't have a queue at the door.
4. The number of reviews per week and what's mentioned in them.

Two weeks is enough to see something. If nothing moves, it's not your solution and stopping costs you nothing further either.

What you'd better not do

Two things keep coming back with venues that try it and then stop. The first is material you have to maintain yourself: game boxes with missing pieces, broken pencils, cards that are no longer complete. The second is something that takes too long. A forty-minute board game doesn't fit in a fifteen-minute gap.

Keep it under five minutes, and make sure you don't have to set anything up for it yourself.

Where to start

Pick one thing and do it consistently, rather than three things half-heartedly. If it doesn't work, you'll know within two weeks. If it does work, you'll notice it in the orders after the main course and in what guests write in their reviews.

If you want to see what games on the table cost for a venue of your size, check out the prices. For restaurants specifically there's a separate page on how it plays out at a restaurant.