Last updated . Source: SnagRes availability record, 61,530,416 checks across 284 restaurants through 19 October 2026. How we measure. Open dataset.
If the table has to be secured rather than hoped for, screen on availability and on seating time together. Per Se was bookable on 40% of the dates we checked with 28% of its open slots in prime time, Golden Steer Steakhouse on 97% with 59% prime, Casa Mono on 100% with 8% prime, and Nubeluz on 80% with 15% prime. The rooms people reach for first, such as The Polo Bar, 4 Charles Prime Rib and Torrisi, are gettable but need the release or an alert rather than a booking made at leisure.
The room is, but read the clock before you commit. Le Bernardin showed a bookable table on 61% of the dates we checked, which is genuinely available, yet only 1% of the 756,964 open slots we have recorded there fall between 7:00 and 8:30 PM, and the most frequently open seating is 10:30 PM. It is an excellent choice if a late seating suits your guest and a poor one if it does not. Its best night in our data is Tuesday at 95%.
Most of the difficult rooms open their calendar around 30 days out, so that is the earliest a specific night can be taken. For an important dinner, plan on being there at the release and running an alert alongside it, because cancellations are how most of these tables are actually caught. Monkey Bar books only 20 days ahead, so the window differs by room and is worth checking rather than assuming.
Yes, if you plan around how it books. The Polo Bar takes reservations by phone, a month ahead from 10 AM, and its online calendar rarely shows a table: across 644,820 checks none sat open long enough for us to see. So call on the morning your date opens, and keep a confirmed backup until you have it.
Per Se at 40% of dates, Golden Steer Steakhouse at 97%, Casa Mono at 100%, Essex at 100%, Oberon at 43%, Nubeluz at 80%, Jungsik at 80%, ICCA at 77% and Atera at 60%. All are rooms a guest will recognise or be glad to discover, and all were available on most nights we looked. Prestige and scarcity are much more weakly correlated than people assume.
Yes, and not always in the direction people expect. Cote read 0% of dates for two and 93% for four, Minetta Tavern 42% and 77%, Le Bernardin 61% and 77%, and Monkey Bar 50% and 20%. At other rooms it reverses, with Lilia at 63% for two and 33% for four. Because we measure both party sizes on every check, the right move is to look rather than to guess.
There is a short list of restaurants that come to mind when a client dinner has to land, and it is remarkably consistent: The Polo Bar, 4 Charles Prime Rib, Carbone, Torrisi, Monkey Bar, The Corner Store. We watch all six continuously. The Polo Bar books by phone, a month out from 10 AM. 4 Charles Prime Rib and The Corner Store go the moment their tables are released, so the release itself is the way in. Carbone and Torrisi do open up, briefly: 81% and 30% of their dates had a table at some point in our record. Monkey Bar is the easiest of the six, open for two on 50% of dates at our last check.
So at the hardest of these, a client dinner three weeks out needs a plan rather than a hope: be at the release, or have an alert running for the table someone gives back. The instinct that produced the list is sound, because those rooms genuinely do the job. The catch is that the same instinct fired for everyone else in the city on the same morning, and the room seats a fixed number of people.
Carbone is the clearest illustration of what that looks like from the outside. We logged 300 separate release events there across 22 observed days, which means the calendar flickered open and shut roughly fourteen times a day as people grabbed and dropped seats. Each of those was a real table for whoever saw it first. Motion is not the same as an open calendar, but it is how people get in.
The useful move is to separate two things people merge: the restaurants that impress, and the restaurants you can get on your date. They overlap more than the difficulty of the famous ones suggests, but you have to screen on the right thing, and almost nobody does.
The Polo Bar: book by phone, a month out from 10 AM.
4 Charles Prime Rib and The Corner Store: be ready at the release, then keep an alert on.
Torrisi: 30% of dates opened up at some point, and a four-top appeared on 0% of dates.
Monkey Bar: open for two on 50% of dates, and for four on 47%.
Carbone: 81% of dates opened up at some point, with 581 release events logged.
This is the mistake that makes most restaurant advice useless for a client dinner, and we made it ourselves in an earlier version of this page. A room can be bookable on three nights out of four and still never offer you a time you could put a guest in.
Le Bernardin holds three Michelin stars and showed a bookable table on 61% of the dates we checked, so it looks like the obvious answer. Then look at the clock. Across 756,964 recorded open slots, 1% fall between 7:00 and 8:30 PM, 66% are at 9 PM or later, and the single most frequently open seating is 10:30 PM. Cote, the Michelin-starred Korean steakhouse in Flatiron, reads 0% of dates available with 0% of its open slots in prime time and a most frequent opening of 11:00 PM. Minetta Tavern reads 42% available, 0% prime, and peaks at 10:30 PM across 2,198,992 slots.
All three are excellent rooms and all three are genuinely open. What they are open for is a very late seating. That is a fine solution for a dinner among friends and a poor one for a guest who has flown in, has a 7 AM flight out, or simply expects dinner at dinner time.
So screen on two numbers rather than one: the share of dates with any table, and the share of open slots that land between 7:00 and 8:30 PM. We publish both for every room we track. A directory that advertises 62,198 restaurants can publish neither, because knowing the second one requires reading the same calendar thousands of times rather than listing it once.
Le Bernardin: 61% of dates open, 1% of open slots in prime time, peak 10:30 PM.
Cote: 70% of dates open, 0% prime, peak 11:00 PM.
Minetta Tavern: 74% of dates open, 0% prime, peak 10:30 PM.
A high availability figure and a usable dinner time are separate claims. Check both.
Screen on both numbers and a different list appears. These are rooms a guest will be pleased to be taken to, which were bookable on most of the dates we checked, and whose open slots actually include the hours you want. Every figure is a point-in-time reading of the current window dated 19 October 2026, alongside that restaurant's own share of the open seating times we have recorded.
Per Se is the surprise. Three Michelin stars, Columbus Circle, and it showed a bookable table on 40% of the dates in the window for a party of two and for a party of four, with 28% of its open slots inside prime time. Nothing about the room is casual and nothing about booking it was hard. Golden Steer Steakhouse in Greenwich Village is the strongest steakhouse reading we have: 97% of dates open, 59% of open slots in prime time, most frequent opening 6:45 PM.
For a dinner that should feel like New York rather than like a chophouse, Casa Mono near Union Square read 100% of dates open with 36% of slots in prime time and a 7:15 PM peak. Essex on the Lower East Side read 100% of dates for both party sizes with an 8:45 PM peak. Nubeluz in NoMad, which is a room designed to be walked into with a guest, read 80% of dates open and 49% prime, peaking at 7:15 PM.
Tribeca is quietly the most reliable neighbourhood on this list. ICCA read 77% of dates open with 41% of slots in prime time, Jungsik 80% for both party sizes, and Atera 60%. All three are tasting-menu rooms on Tock, which is worth knowing before you go looking for them on Resy.
None of these require a campaign. That is the actual finding: prestige and scarcity are weakly correlated, and a month of refreshing at a 0% room is being spent to avoid a phone call you could make today.
Per Se, Columbus Circle, Tock: 100% of dates open for two and for four, 28% of slots prime time.
Golden Steer Steakhouse, Greenwich Village, OpenTable: 97% open, 59% prime, peak 6:45 PM.
Casa Mono, Union Square, OpenTable: 100% open, 36% prime, peak 7:15 PM.
Essex, Lower East Side, Resy: 100% open for two and four, 27% prime.
Nubeluz, NoMad, OpenTable: 80% open, 49% prime, peak 7:15 PM.
ICCA, Tribeca, Tock: 77% open, 41% prime. Jungsik, Tribeca, Tock: 80% open.
Huso, Greenwich Village, Resy: 65% open, 50% prime, peak 8:30 PM.
Sometimes the restaurant is the point. A guest has named it, or the relationship warrants the room that is hardest to get, and a sensible substitute is not what the evening needs. In that case the job changes from booking to waiting, and it has to start earlier than feels reasonable.
Be clear about what the data does and does not tell you here. At the rooms that do open, we log the hour new dates appear and report the modal one: Torrisi at 10 AM across 116 logged release events, Monkey Bar at 9 AM across 273, Carbone at 10 AM across 300. At The Polo Bar, 4 Charles Prime Rib and The Corner Store we have logged no release event at all, because nothing has opened for us to observe. Any page that quotes you a precise drop time for those three is telling you something it cannot know, and we are not going to.
What we can tell you is that the tables at these rooms come back by cancellation, at hours nobody would choose. A four-top returned at 3:40 PM on a Wednesday is a real table, live for a few minutes, and completely invisible unless something is watching. That is not a problem effort solves.
It is also the point in the evening where someone offers to sell you the table. TableSwap charges $75 for a successful reservation, which is the practice New York's 2024 reservation law was written to stop, and a resold table arrives in somebody else's name on an expense report. SnagRes never books, holds or resells a reservation. We watch the calendar and text you, and you complete the booking yourself, in your own account, at the restaurant's own price.
Three practical levers, and none of them require luck. Take them in this order.
Party size does not run the way it is usually described. We measure a two-top and a four-top separately, and at several of these rooms the four-top is the easier booking, not the harder one: Cote reads 0% for two and 93% for four, Minetta Tavern 42% and 77%, Le Bernardin 61% and 77%. Monkey Bar and Torrisi are at 0% for two and still show a four-top on 20% and 0% of dates. It also runs the other way at some rooms, with Lilia at 63% for two and 33% for four, so check both rather than assuming a direction.
The night matters, but check the room rather than the city. The city-wide gap between the easiest weekday and the hardest is only 7.8 points, while inside one restaurant the median swing is 20. Le Bernardin reads 97% on a Tuesday and 50% on a Saturday. Cote reads 63% on a Thursday and 20% on a Sunday. Minetta Tavern reads 100% on a Wednesday. If the dinner date is flexible, that is where the flexibility is worth spending.
Then confirm the platform before the release rather than during it. These rooms are spread across all four: Per Se, Jungsik, Atera and ICCA are on Tock, The Corner Store is on SevenRooms, Golden Steer, Casa Mono and Nubeluz are on OpenTable, and most of the rest are Resy. Discovering that at 9:59 AM costs you the drop.
Check four as well as two. At Cote, Minetta Tavern and Le Bernardin the four-top is the easier booking.
Use the room's own best weekday, not the city's. The median room swings 20 points across the week.
Confirm the platform in advance. Resy, Tock, OpenTable and SevenRooms are all in play.
Start watching three to four weeks out, not the week of.
Hold a real booking at an available room and run an alert on the hard one.
Every number here comes from re-reading the same calendars around the clock: every date in the booking window, for a party of two and a party of four, recording every open time we see. That is 61,530,416 availability checks so far across the 284 restaurants we follow in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago, and the percentages are a point-in-time reading of the current window dated 19 October 2026.
The list is short on purpose. Table Alert advertises 62,198 restaurants and Table Alert cannot tell you that Le Bernardin peaks at 10:30 PM or that Carbone flickered 300 times in 22 days, because nothing watching 62,198 rooms reads any single one of them often enough to know. We traded coverage for the ability to say something specific and true about one room, which is exactly what a client dinner needs.
For a dinner that has to happen on a particular night, the honest advice is to hold a real booking at one of the available rooms and let an alert run on the harder one. If the hard table appears you have a decision to make. If it does not, you were never exposed. That is a better position than three weeks of refreshing followed by a Thursday afternoon scramble.
SnagRes watches the restaurants you choose across Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms and texts you the moment a table appears, including the cancellations that surface long after a release is gone. It does not book, hold or resell anything. You complete the reservation yourself, in your own account.
Keep reading: The same question in San Francisco · Which rooms actually sell 7 PM · Picking the night for the dinner · How party size changes the odds · The hardest reservations in NYC · Live difficulty ranking
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SnagRes checks 284 hard-to-book restaurants across four cities and alerts you when one opens. Watching one is free and no card is needed: watch a table free in New York City, or last-minute tables in NYC tonight.