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

Between taking the order and the moment the plate is on the table, most establishments have ten to twenty minutes. On a quiet Tuesday, nobody notices. On a busy Saturday evening, or at a table with two impatient children, that quarter of an hour determines 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 into queues keeps arriving at 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 estimates it as shorter than it was.

For a restaurant, that means something practical. You don't need to shorten the wait 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 it 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 taking the order. 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.

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

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

Six methods that work in practice

1. Something on the table that immediately does something

A small dish of olives, a piece of bread, a house amuse-bouche. Small, cheap, and it turns the moment of waiting into the beginning of the meal. It works mainly because it's a signal: you're being thought of.

2. A colouring page or puzzle booklet for children

The classic, and for good 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. Expect five to ten minutes of attention per child.

3. Table games via a QR code

The version without scattered materials. Each table gets its own QR code; the guest scans with their own phone and plays directly in the browser, without an app. A round takes two to five minutes, exactly the length of the gap you want to fill. With TablePlay, guests can play alone, together on one phone, or compete against another table in the establishment. See all the games available.

4. Starting a conversation instead of asking a question

"Is everything to your liking?" always gets a "yes, fine". "Have you been here before?" or "is this a special occasion?" gets a conversation going, and a conversation shortens the wait without costing anything.

5. Showing something

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

6. Being honest about the wait 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 establishment

Restaurant with a kitchen that runs on time

Here the wait time is predictable: ten to twenty minutes, every evening again. This is 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 isn't interrupted halfway through by the food arriving.

Café where people stay seated for a long time

At a café, it's not about a gap between two courses but about the evening itself. Here something that can be repeated and has a competitive element works. Table versus table or a regular quiz night suits better than a short puzzle.

Establishment with many families

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

Hotel or holiday park

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

What it delivers

Filling wait time isn't an end in itself. It's about what happens afterwards:

• Guests stay seated longer, and someone who stays longer is more likely to order something else.
• The rating of the visit goes up without anything about the food having changed.
• Staff get some breathing room: less impatience at the table means fewer interruptions during rush hour.
• Families are more likely to return to an establishment where the children enjoyed themselves.

How to know if it's working

The temptation is great to judge this by feel, and feel is unreliable here: a busy evening always feels good. Four figures do say 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 proportion 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 it costs you nothing further to stop with it.

What you'd better not do

Two things keep coming back with establishments 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 into a fifteen-minute gap.

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

Where to start

Choose 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 table games cost for an establishment of your size, take a look at the prices. For restaurants specifically, there's a separate page on how it works out for a restaurant.