A classic yet persevering dilemma that everybody experiences is waiting for a table at a popular restuarant. I live in a relatively small city, and even here, there are crowds of people that my friends and I often wait in line with for as much as 40 minutes to grab a table. It’s a classic trope, even in comedy: one example is a bit from the show Seinfeld where in which Jerry and friends want to get a table at a Chinese restaurant. They argue about whether or not to leave the restaurant and go elsewhere, because they don’t know exactly how long it will take before they get in. A humorous episode no doubt, but the humor relies on a very real problem that people deal with.
Well, there’s a profit to be made and a service to give for every problem people face in their day-to-day lives. As such, Nowait was created. Nowait is an app that allows users to reserve a place in line without actually being at the restaurant they wish to go to. Nowait will track the amount of time you have before you can finally get to your table. In this way, you can be with your friends or family or whoever and choose which restaurant you want to visit in a more efficient and effective way. It always irks me whenever the group I’m with is torn between two different restaurants and, when we finally decide on one, it’s wait is somewhere next to an hour, and if we choose to go to the other restaurant instead, we always run the risk of its wait being even longer.
Of course, you can always call in ahead of time to see how long the wait is, but if you live in a big city then it might take you awhile to reach your destination, and by that time the wait could be even longer. A service like Nowait can be extremely useful, especially if you make a habit of eating out more than just on occasion.
"The essential tool for both restaurants and guests, Nowait is the shortcut to amazing dining experiences," the Nowait staff claim on their website. "Our waitlist app reaches and engages diners with an unforgettable mobile guest experience on the largest restaurant discovery platform on the planet and serves up a streamlined dining experience that delights guests and brings them back for more. All this while providing first in class front-of-house management and improving operational efficiency. Easy to use and even easier to love, Nowait provides the ideal restaurant experience for both sides of the table."
A bold claim to be sure, but if you’re like me, you might want to have a little more technical information than that. Personally, I like bullet points:
Use app to browse nearby restaurants for accurate wait times.
Add yourself to any list and avoid the wait.
Receive a text when your table is ready.
Walk in like a VIP.
Privately rate your experience.
"In August, Yelp made an $8 million investment in Nowait and and integrated Nowait’s technology into the Yelp app," the website also notes. "Now, if Yelp users find a restaurant they like, they’re now able to get in line using Nowait directly within the Yelp app."
We are all aware of the influence that the app Yelp has had in our restaurant visiting habits. Nowait only adds to the usefulness of Yelp. Of course, Nowait cannot be used for every restaurant, and it’s dependability is totally reliant on how the dependable the restaurant is that you are seeking to go to.
Hopefully, we will see a wane in comedic situations revolving around going to a popular restaurants with the help of the app of Nowait. Again, the service is fairly new and needs to work out some bugs, but what it offers is preferable to the alternative – the alternative being either calling a restaurant ahead of time and risking the estimated wait time changing by the time you get there, or simply going in person and sitting for an extended amount of time, while you anxiously wait to be seated, getting hungrier and hungrier by the second.
