It has nothing to do with waiting for tables and everything to do with the food being both more expensive and less tasty than the kind of food you get from holes in the wall.

Honestly, I'd even take an everyday American Chinese restaurant over one of those yuppie restaurants that sell overpriced Chinese-ish food aimed at white yuppies (the Americanization bothers me less than the catering to the yuppie community... regular old working-class American Chinese food is actually pretty tasty, even if it's not my favorite, which is more than I can say for Yuppie Chinese).