When it came time to choose where I’d eat during the recent World Fantasy Convention—and you know me, I hate to waste a meal on a hotel restaurant—my number one choice was Rose’s Luxury, judged by Bon Appétit as 2014’s best new restaurant in America. Getting the chance to eat there represented a different sort of challenge than most popular restaurants I’ve been to, which have involved using my Internet-fu to snag a table the instant reservations for the date I needed became available online.

Rose’s Luxury, however, doesn’t take reservations. Which results in the kind of wait one Yelp reviewer recently experienced: “We waited in line approximately 1h45m before putting our name down. After that was another 2h30m wait to get a table.” And another, who waited even longer: “I waited about 5 hours for a table on a Saturday night, starting from lining up outside at 4:30 to being seated around 10:00pm.”

There seemed to be only one way to avoid that kind of wait—arrive around 90 minutes before the restaurant opens, guaranteeing you’ll be part of the first seating. That will keep wait time to a minimum. I was up for standing outside the restaurant before it opened—hey, I had no problem getting to Franklin BBQ three hours before it opened, so 90 minutes was nothing to me—but would I find others foodies at WFC who’d think the experience worth the wait?

I did!

Here I am with Rajan Khanna, Jenn Reese, Liz Argall, Greg van Eekhout, and Barry Goldblatt after we’d ordered and eaten EVERY FREAKING DISH on the menu that night.

But let’s go back in time, and see how the night began … (more…)