As I entered the parking lot on Halal Guys opening day, I knew the line would be long, but not this long. The queue of bodies literally wrapped around the building. I hadn't seen anything like it since Din Tai Fung opened in South Coast Plaza and the early days of Kogi. Unlike DTF and Kogi, I did not stand in it. Instead I circled back around and left.
Later, I read on Facebook and Twitter reports of a 4-hour wait that day, and that they eventually had to cut off people from waiting around 7 p.m., so that they could still close at their regular time at 11 p.m.
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Yesterday, I tried again but not before e-mailing Halal Guys asking “What's the average wait time today?”
I didn't get a reply before I got in line and took the picture you see above. Though I gave up before I got to the door, at the rate it was moving, I would estimate it would be about 1.5 hours from the end of the line at 5:30 p.m. to actually order and get food.
Halal Guys replied after closing time (it would be safe to assume they were busy attending to actual customers than to reply to people like me who were curious about the wait time).
They said:
Hello! Thank you for reaching out. It really depends, the lines are still long. Unfortunately, it is hard to tell when they will get better. We are trying to work as fast as possible to work through the lines and serve all our guests! I apologize we can't give you a better estimate on the wait time.
Did you wait? If so when and how long did it take?
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Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.