Restaurants Would Prefer You Didn’t Order Dessert

iStock/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — “What’s for dessert?” is a question that a lot of restaurants really don’t want to hear, according to a report in The Washington Post.

Although conventional wisdom suggests that restaurants would love you and your table to order dessert in order to pad the check, George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen contends the opposite is true.

Cowen explains that by ordering dessert, diners hang around longer and what restaurants really want is for you to leave so they can sit a new group of customers at the table.

As it stands, restaurants don’t make much of a profit on the food they serve and desserts offer the thinnest of margins, according to Cowen. Part of the problem is that they have to hire a pastry chef and provide room for the chef in the kitchen.

Yet, there are two exceptions to this rule: those restaurants that don’t do much business and want to sell as much food as possible and others on the high-end of the scale where diners don’t even blink when they’re offered a dessert costing $20 or more.

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