Google shows the waiting times at your favorite restaurants

If weird food trends (cronut, anyone?) have taught us anything it's that people are prepared to wait a long time for a seat at a restaurant, so whether you're visiting a popular local eatery or Time Out's latest gastro-pick, you're faced with two choices. Attempt to beat the crowds by having dinner at 4pm, or rock up whenever and hope the people in the line ahead give up before you do. Now though, in a development we can't believe didn't happen sooner, Google will show you the wait times of nearly a million sit-down restaurants around the world.

Just search for the restaurant on Google, open the business listing and scroll down to the Popular Times section where you'll see the estimated wait time at that very moment. You can also plan ahead by tapping on any of the hour bars to see an estimated wait for that time period, and can scroll left and right to see a summary of the day's total waiting times. Earlier this year Yelp and Nowait partnered to bring us remote queuing, but with Google's new function you'll now be able to skip the queue altogether.