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Waiting for a Table

The line around 1 pm on a Saturday at Paseo's in Fremont
Heather W.
/
Yelp.com
The line around 1 pm on a Saturday at Paseo's in Fremont

So how long would you be willing to stand on line for a table at a popular restaurant? Ten minutes? A half hour? Longer? Not KPLU’s Dick Stein, as he tells Seattle Times food writer Nancy Leson on today’s Food for Thought.

Dick calls it "demeaning," and won't do it.  Nancy will do it—sometimes! There's a limit to their patience when it comes to waiting for a table at local restaurants. Nancy tells the story of a new Bellevue restaurant that had wait lines of 3 to 4 hours. Even she won't do that.

For diners, the wait can be worth it. For restaurant owners, long lines have their own benefits, even if customers give up and move on. See if you agree. Then be sure to leave your own comments about wait times and restaurant recommendations below.

Also, check out Nancy's restaurant recommendation, Koch's Deli. It's not local. In fact, she'd rather be in Philadelphia if she has to wait in line. 

Dick Stein joined KNKX in January 1992. He retired in 2020 after three decades on air. During his storied radio career, he hosted the morning jazz show, co-hosted and produced "Food for Thought" with Nancy Leson and wrote and directed the Jimmy Jazzoid live radio musical comedies and 100 episodes of Jazz Kitchen.
Nancy Leson is an award-winning food writer, radio personality, cooking instructor and public speaker who learned much of what she knows about food during her first career: waiting tables. Seattle readers know her as the mouth that scored — for the better part of two decades — as restaurant critic and food columnist for the Seattle Times. These days, when she’s not chatting about recipes or interviewing makers and shakers in the food world for KNKX, she helps end hunger, one loaf at a time, as the Edmonds hub coordinator for the Community Loaves project. Find her @nancyleson and at nancyleson.com.