Restaurant openings are not normally an exciting thing I look forward to, especially not for a chained establishment I’ve already been dining at since the 1990’s. But a few days ago, I did exactly that when I went with my partner to the first Cheesecake Factory to come to Michigan, which had just opened its doors only two days earlier. Located at the Twelve Oaks Mall in Novi, MI, which is just outside Detroit, the opening marked the 164th addition for the restaurant chain. And if there is one thing you can expect to happen at any Cheesecake Factory, especially for one that just opened its doors with no others locations around it for several hundred miles, it’s that you are going to be waiting a long time to be seated.
Waiting for extended times at various restaurants is something quite familiar to me as I have dined out quite a bit throughout my life. But the longest I can honestly say I’ve ever had to wait to be seated at any restaurant is actually at the Cheesecake Factory. That’s only because the visit I had a few days ago to the one that just opened outside Detroit wasn’t the first opening I had ever been to for the chain. When I had lived in the Washington D.C. area, I had gone to one of their original openings back when there were only a handful of them in the country and that was at the one being opened in Bethesda, Maryland. I can still remember that night I went there and waited for over 3 hours and 30 minutes simply because the hype had been so great surrounding the restaurant. On many other occasions of dining there in the years that followed, my wait times were still between two and three hours.
I’m not sure if it’s the 200 plus menu item choices, or the 38 types of cheesecake, or the incredibly large portions that convince so many people to wait for as long as they do like I always have at the Cheesecake Factory. But either way, I learned very early on with this chain that the worst time to go is definitely in its first few weeks of opening, especially in an area where there has never been one. And the only reason why I went to another grand opening again was purely for the fact that my partner and I had a gift certificate to use and that it’s his favorite restaurant chain.
While it’s a no brainer to me now that one can expect long waiting times to be seated when a big named restaurant first opens its doors, that didn’t seem to be the same feeling shared with many others I observed in the Novi restaurant the other day. It appeared that quite a number of people came with too high of expectations. Many were grumpy and complaining on how long they had to wait or how the wait times kept changing. My partner and I arrived directly between the lunch and dinner hours and were told it was going to be 70 minutes before we would get seated. Given my previous experiences with the Cheesecake Factory, I knew it was going to be a lot longer than that. So instead of staying in the throngs of people crammed together near the front desk, I took a stroll into the mall. When I returned, there were even more people jammed together so I chose to wait outside instead. I found a nice spot by myself and enjoyed the cool air on a very beautiful summer day. By the time we had gotten seated, it had taken just about two hours of time and I was pleasantly surprised as I thought it was going to be even longer than that. Even better, I was calm and stress free. My partner on the other hand was extremely tense and quite upset about the whole process, had visited the front desk several times, and had commented on how he felt many others had gotten seated ahead of us that shouldn’t have been. What’s interesting is that I saw a mirror with him reflecting back on myself to how I once was. It’s how I was at that Bethesda opening when I waited for those three and a half hours and it’s how I acted for many years after that, at many other restaurants, where I had also endured any long waiting times to be seated.
Thankfully, after we were seated, my partner quickly got over his frustrations and we had a very enjoyable meal. During it, we spoke to many of the waitresses that passed by who told us that quite a few people were extremely irritated and grumpy over the length of time it took them to get seated. Some had even waited up to five hours of time and weren’t very miserable about it. I was grateful I wasn’t one of them as not once had I felt stressed about the wait time. Is that due to the fact that I had been down that road so many times before? Or is it because I had compassion for a place that was just trying to get its new bearings in order? Or could it have been that all those prayers to God to gain greater patience have paid off? I’m not sure which of them is the truest answer, but regardless, I’m just grateful I remained calm and had an enjoyable experience from the time we arrived till the time we left several hours later.
Whether you find yourself waiting a long time at a restaurant to be seated like I did the other day, or are in a long line for a ride at an amusement park, or are at some store waiting to purchase something, I encourage you to take a moment, breathe, and realize it’s a choice you’re making to continue doing so. Ask God to give you patience if you decide to remain there, especially for those moments when it appears that others are getting ahead of you or that it’s taking way too long. You might find in doing so that your wait time flies by much quicker than if you decided to complain your whole way through it instead.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
