Thank you for your reply!
Interestingly enough, if I run the second option (PATINDEX) I see a 3sec improvement, which is huge, because the initial run was 4-5sec and this is about 1-2sec.
The problem is, if I put just this query (PATINDEX) ,  with absolutely no other statements, into a sp and send the %text% as a parameter to the sp, it goes back to 5sec