Was it worth the wait?

Saturday night Brent and I decided that we wanted Chinese food. We had just gotten home from attending a wedding at church and we were hungry for dinner! Wanting to take advantage of these last few months of just the two of us, we decided to make it a real nice evening and splurge and go get "real" Chinese food at PF Chang's downtown in the Pembroke area. We had been a few times before to eat there, but never just the two of us. We were quite excited about a nice evening out!

Brent dropped me off at the door while he went to park the car, knowing it would probably be good to get our names on the list ASAP since it was a Saturday night after all and there might be a little bit of a wait. Well I go inside to put our name on the list and the hostess says, "It will be 2 and a half hours." I almost panicked and ran away, but thinking she must be padding the time generously just because it was Saturday night and surely it won't be THAT long - who would seriously wait that long anyway? I go ahead and put our name on the list and wait for Brent to arrive so we can decide together if we want to stay or not.

Brent's jaw dropped when I said "two and a half hours" (understandably so!), but when I told him surely it can't be THAT long, he agreed and said "let's wait it out for a while." Mind you, there weren't more than 10 people waiting by the door that had come in before us. We initially arrived at PF Chang's at 7:05pm.

8 o'clock rolls around. Luckily we were able to snag two chairs inside so we could at least be sitting while we wait .. I definitely wasn't confident I could make a wait this long standing up! Most of the discussion between Brent and I centered around "should we keep waiting?" "surely we're next in line," "there's only two of us," "by the time we make it back home we'll be seated here, so let's stay." You know the deal where you say, "let's give it 20 more minutes and then we'll leave?" Yeah, we had that discussion MANY times! But the yummy smells of the food kept us waiting.

Luckily the main hostess was having a minor breakdown that evening. Twice we heard her mumble to her coworkers "I Quit! I can't take this anymore." I think she's taking her job a bit too seriously! She definitely wasn't having a good night and I surely didn't want to upset her more by asking where we were on the list of people to be seated! I waited until probably 8:45pm to go ask where we were on the list thinking she might leave to take one of her walks around the restaurant to glare at people not leaving their tables quickly enough. But she did not! So I got up and asked and she said "We have you on the list for 9:37pm." I'm thinking, ok, that's 2.5 hours exactly from when we arrived.. why didn't I just do that math myself and save this lady some trouble! Well, honestly I thought she might say, "you're next!" NOPE!

At this point, Brent and I had definitely made our final decision to stay. We were crazy enough to have waited 2 hours.. what's 30 more minutes! We discovered that probably 75% of the people eating there had made reservations. We realized this when droves of people would come check-in, wait the twenty minutes the hostess said they were behind on the "reservation people" by, and go get seated we realized we had done this the TOTAL WRONG WAY! What were we thinking?! Nobody comes here as a "walk-in." Obviously the wait would be too long.

LONG STORY short! We finally sat down at our table at 9:45pm. To answer the question of whether it was worth the wait?? WE MADE IT worth it!! And it was! We each ordered an entree and split an order of garlic noodles. AND we shared a dessert! YUM!

We definitely learned a lesson about PF Chang's! MAKE RESERVATIONS!!!

We made it home by 11:30 or so and, in the end, we can say we had fun together and enjoyed spending the evening together! Will we ever wait this long again? Probably not =)