Don't be surprised in the new millennium to find several of your city's best restaurant adding a surcharge of 15 percent, 20 percent or even more to your tab on Friday or Saturday nights.

At the most trendy eateries, you might also find that Sunday brunch and other popular dining periods will be subject to prim-time premiums for dining privileges.

Less-crowded dinner times, on the other hand, say, on Monday or Tuesday nights, automatically might include discounts or value-sized specials to lure diners.

Some futurists also have envisioned minute-to-minute flexibility in menu pricing, with add-on bargains offered to guests on the basis of a computer's instantaneous analysis of per-order profit yields and current commodity costs.

Welcome to 21st-century restaurant dining, when peak-time premiums and off-peak value enticements are expected to be employed by operators seking to match pricing to demand.

"It's called yield management," says Dean Haskell, a former analyst with First Union Securities and now chief executive at Real American Restaurants in Sausalito, Calif. Haskell says the traditional 4p.m.-to 6p.m. early-bird specials are a form of the off-peak special pricing that could be adapted to more and ore dining situations.

"Why charge the same for a Saturday night, when everybody wants to go out to a restaurant, as you do for a Monday night, when nobody is there?" asks Ron Paul, president of Tecchnomic Inc., a Chicago-based consulting and data research firm.

Paul says consumers already are used to paying premium fares for peak travel times on airlines, trains, ships and buses and higher room rates at resorts and hotels during peak season bookings.

Experts say foodservice operators who are able to fill in off-hours, while still maintaining steady traffic at peak demand times, will increase the return on their investment substantially because steady patronage offsets the high fixed expense of running a restaurant - including real estate and equipment costs.

Unreal estate? Futurists see spaced-out site alternatives

Once again meet George Jetson, his daughter, Judy; Jane, his wife; and their boy, Elroy. When they go out for a meal well into the new millennium, it could indeed be in a low orbit around Earth. As with any parcel of real estate, the planet likely will remain faithful to that old axiom of location, location, location, even in the zero-G, artificial-atmosphere restaurant venues of the future.

For anyone who can imagine a hundred years down the road, space-based eateries aren't so far-fetched. After all, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has estimated a space hotel might be completed by 2017, allowing for space tourism and such accompanying space amenities as restaurants.

As new Las Vegas hotels reach the stratospheric costst of billions of dollars each, such a space-resort venture is seeming less and less an improbability.

While the Jetson's family dinner in a gravity-free environment would help solve the etiquette problem of what to do when the diner drops a fork - it would float, of coarse - more down to earth scenarios exist for future restaurant locations.

Those forecasts are being influenced by the price of real estate and the shifting market bases - to the suburbs from urban centers and back again. And, of course, there are those ever-expanding Internet portals to e-commerce and telecommuting, which some futurists say radically could curtail construction of retailers' traditional brick-and-mortar host environments for restaurants.

What happens after I check out?

After you have completed the online order process. You will receive a call from the restaurant confirming the transaction. You can then pick up or be delivered of the ordered items.