It took forever for our order to be taken.
Sabah was in the restaurant for about twenty minutes, waiting for our orders of chicken tikka.
We waited 15 minutes for water and drinks and for our order to be taken — and interminably (so it seemed) for the food to arrive.
We resisted the urge to dive into an empty cafe nearby and just soaked up the Berlin atmosphere while waiting for our order.
A brusque server kept interrupting our reading of the detailed menu with requests for our orders and, as we finished our entrees, asked that we have our dessert at the crowded bar.
"We forget how much time it can take simply to avoid cooking: all that time spent driving to restaurants or waiting for our orders, none of which gets counted as 'food preparation'.
While we waited for our orders, I went back to the kitchen to meet the cook, Everest Neretse, who was wearing a white chef's jacket and flip-flops.
"Our in-house staff uses a multilevel process of software verification and customer service review to verify the credit information for our orders on a daily basis," says Susan Barone, chief executive of AlwaysForMe.com, a New York-based lingerie maker.
Our waitress, Jennifer, came back for our orders and raised her eyebrows a little at Emma's.
As we sat parked in front of the restaurant waiting for our order, he couldn't let it go.
