sometimes when my sims go to eat at the table, someone is doing something behind the chair and they have a route fail tantrum. I understand why this is happening, but it is a nuisance that I have to wait for the sim in question to sit somewhere else before I can get them to go back and eat their food. Does anyone know of a way to have them either go somewhere else with their food, or else keep the eating action in their queue?

I have this issue all the time. For overstuffed households I use 1-tile tables with just 2 chairs and separate them by at least a half a tile. That seems to help quite a bit. I also try to leave plenty of room around the refrigerators (my sims usually eat leftovers) and the tables. I also don't place chairs at the ends of 2 or 3 tile wide tables; that never works for me.

icarus_allsorts has a 'set the table & call to meal' mod which does a nice job of calling the household to eat while generally avoiding such issues.
http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=535651
I haven't really worked that mod into my usual gameplay; instead I watch my sims eat and deal with issues as they come up.

thanks for that help. I will try the mod as most of my houses are small and pretty full. Even when I have the tables with plenty of room around them, other sims always seem to be walking behind the chairs.

Icarus' mod should help a lot. It seems that sims directed by it to sit at their own assigned serving in their own chair will try a few times before giving up and going off to sulk in the corner, so someone passing by behind that chair at just the wrong moment doesn't hurt as much. There will still be some failures especially in tight spaces, but not nearly as many. And sometimes after a more persistent route failure I will just direct them to eat their meal individually (if part of the active household) and they will grab their food and eat it someplace less crowded like on a sofa nearby if they really need to. But the mod is brilliant.

That mod solves the issue but you can't serve it for your group and it erases the ability to call to meal. I noticed a lot of people upset it replaces the existing actions rather than adding to the menu.

You can't serve for guests either and the number of meals left is always wrong for me.

@yuk75 - I'm sorry, but that has not been my experience with the mod at all. The original call to meal option is still there for me, though to be fair I never use it anymore since it usually fails to get everyone fed anyway, lot greeted guests can most certainly be served along with the active household as can groups in outing situations, and I've never seen the mod subtract the wrong number of servings from group platters. I wonder if you have something else in play that is interfering with its operation.

Nor do I see "a lot of people" upset about it. I see two. Icarus used to be a regular contributor here, he worked on many NRaas mods during their evolution in addition to his own, and we helped test many of them including this one. We really wouldn't have let him get away with such sloppiness, and he would not have wanted us to.

I use the mod exclusively for the number of leftovers it shows. That number is never wrong for me.

I've never had any issues serving guests with the mod or the number of meals left either. I use it on community lots as well, when I've had sims cook burgers or hotdogs and invite some of the folks at the park to sit and eat with my sims. Its a very helpful mod.

The last few comments are upset about the action being a replacement, maybe there's an older version that you guys have that it leaves those options there? In my games it replaces them.

I have one mod that increases the number of servings but even still it is counting those servings but the sim just keeps serving until there's nothing left (even though there should be some).