Frank Bruni discusses what restaurants should do when you are left waiting...

A bit of a wait for groups that come in toward the end of the night is sometimes par for the course.

But an apology should also be par for the course. And if the wait is more than 20 minutes, why not offer to compensate the people kept waiting with a round of drinks?

We wandered through the casino that abuts the restaurant for a bit. We had a drink at a nearby bar. Several of my companions went back to check on our table: still not ready. Still no firm prediction of when it would be. Still no offer of drinks or anything like that.

And my companions said that only when they needled and pressed the host about why the wait was so long did he mumble an apology, as a sort of afterthought.

We went back again a half hour later — it was now about an hour past our reservation time. There was still a crowd hovering in front of the host, whose communications with people were clipped, grudging. He had the tense, angry manner of someone who had decided that he was the aggrieved party. To person after person, he veritably barked out the options — hang out in the bar, go away for a while — without a smile, a sigh or any indication that he regretted what they were being asked to endure.

There’s no way to sugarcoat entirely an hour-long wait. But the inconvenience can be sweetened considerably with seemingly genuine expressions of regret.

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