The brunch-wait project
The wait times at eight popular brunch spots.
Just as the promise of warm waffles can be motivation to venture out on a Sunday morning, the fear of a long wait (not to mention a long, cold wait) is a good excuse to stay in and eat Cheerios. At TOC, we believe there’s plenty of brunch to go around, and there’s always a good one nearby without a line. But since we also know the pull of notoriously packed brunches like those at Lula [fig. 1] and Sweet Maple Café [fig. 2], we conducted a small experiment. On a recent Sunday, we tracked the waits at eight popular brunch spots from 9am until 1pm. Are there magic times, we wondered, when waits dwindle and peak?
The answer: not really, and yes. These graphs reveal the obvious answer for people looking for the shortest wait: Get there at 9am. Barring that, you might try eating brunch at 10:15am, when a few waits mysteriously dipped. Whatever you do, do not, under any circumstances, plan to arrive at a brunch spot at noon. That’s when most of us lazy-ass Chicago brunchers are getting hungry, and when almost every wait peaked—sometimes to 75 or 80 minutes. At which point you would have been better off with the Cheerios.
Share with your network
Comment
Also check out
It's okay to be a show-off.
With social reading, seamlessly share your favorite TOC articles, reviews and more with your Facebook friends, and check out what they're reading as well.
Share what you want, when you want: Once you've enabled social reading, easily enable/disable sharing anytime.
See what others are reading: With our new social activity feed, don't miss out on what your friends (and others) are reading.