Half-Assed Gourmet: Another Saturday night and I ain't got no dinner...

OK, so maybe my wife and I were asking for a hassle by attempting to go out for dinner on a Valentine's Day that fell on a Saturday. But we gave it a shot, anyway. It all turned out well, but not before a little misadventure at Bonefish Grill.

We had a relative drop by, which kept us from leaving as early as we planned, but we figured we'd call ahead and do some recon. So at about 4:00, my wife called Sweetwater Tavern and were told the wait was two hours plus. Thus endeth our plan to go there.

Then she called the hastily-chosen backup choice, Bonefish, which doesn't get crowded so early, and asked, "Could you tell us what the wait is?"

The answer: "About an hour."

My wife, rather surprised, said, "An hour? Really?"

And then the woman at Bonefish says, "Oh, you mean right now? There's no wait."

???

Mind you, Mrs. Shark hadn't asked, "What's the median wait at your establishment?" Nor did she say, "I'd like to know what the wait will be like when we get there at about 5:00 or 6:00." She asked what the wait was. She thought the "now" part was kind of implied.

So our family member stopped by a few minutes later, and we thought he was gonna go to dinner with us, but he declined. So we called the restaurant again at about 4:30 and asked what the wait was. "20-25 minutes," we were told. Well, that was a big step up from nothing, but still tolerable. So we bundled up the little one, got ourselves together, and made the 5-minute drive.

The parking lot was packed, so I popped in to ask, you guessed it, what the wait was. The hostess (I don't know if she was the one on the phone) asked, "Do you have reservations?" When I responded with a quick no, I heard, "Well, then it's gonna be at least two hours."

???

A lot had changed since we last called...10 minutes earlier, to say nothing of the first call less than an hour before, when there was no wait, nor any indication that there would BE a two-hour wait later. But after thinking it over, I realized the misunderstanding was probably all ours. After all, when we called the second time and were told the wait was 20-25 minutes, the woman clearly didn't mean that was the wait NOW; she meant that was the wait at 7:00 the night before. DUH!
(The Brooks family soldiered on, only to find Carraba's had "at least" a two-hour wait." So then we went to Austin Grill, or what I call "Fallback Grill" because it's overpriced for what it is but is the only restaurant nearby that doesn't have an insane wait on a weekend evening. We had a nice dinner and a good time, and so the story ended happily. My sense of time, however, was crippled.)