Last updated . Source: SnagRes availability record, 61,530,416 checks across 284 restaurants through 19 October 2026. How we measure. Open dataset.
For the overwhelming majority of restaurants, no. Even among the 80 hardest-to-book rooms we track, 30 showed a bookable table for two on more than half the dates in their window at the last reading and five were open on every date we checked, including Per Se and Essex. Reservations genuinely matter at about twenty specific restaurants, and for prime-time tables anywhere.
The 22 rooms whose two-tops were all taken at the last reading, where the way in is the release time, a cancellation or the door. Fourteen were fully taken for four as well: 4 Charles Prime Rib, The Polo Bar, Don Angie, Somssi, Bungalow, Ha’s Snack Bar, Red Hook Tavern, Una Pizza Napoletana, The Corner Store, The Eighty Six, Raf’s, Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, Ramen By Ra and The Ambassadors Clubhouse. For these, plan on the release time or an alert, or turn up early where the restaurant holds walk-in seats.
Sometimes, and it is the most under-used route in the city. Many hard restaurants hold bar seats, counter seats or a walk-in line back from the booking platforms entirely. Those seats never appear on any calendar, ours included, so a 0% availability figure means you could not have booked the room online, not that you cannot eat there. Calling the restaurant is the only reliable way to find out.
Much. Across the New York rooms we score, only 18% of logged openings fall between 7:00 and 8:30 PM, and twelve rooms have never logged one at all. Monkey Bar puts 95% of its openings before 6 PM, with 11:45 AM the most common slot, while Torrisi puts 78% at 9 PM or later. Accepting an early or late dinner removes a large share of the difficulty on any trip.
At 21 of the New York rooms we score, yes. Monkey Bar showed a bookable four-top on 47% of dates and a two-top on 50%. Torrisi and Semma both read 0% for two and 0% for four, and Cote read 93% for four against 0% for two. Fifteen rooms are easier for two, so it is worth checking per restaurant.
One hundred and forty-four, 84 in New York and 60 in San Francisco, re-checked around the clock across Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms for a running total of 61,530,416 availability checks. That is far fewer than the directories advertise, and it is the reason we can say what a specific room does at a specific hour rather than only whether it exists.
For most of New York, no. For a specific and quite short list, absolutely, and further ahead than you think.
We watch the booking calendars of 80 of the hardest-to-book restaurants in New York around the clock, at two party sizes. These are not neighbourhood places; they are the rooms that appear on every impossible-reservations list. At the last reading, dated 19 October 2026, 30 of the 80 had a bookable table for two on more than half the dates in their window, 19 were open on 70% of dates or more, and five were open on every date we checked.
If the hardest restaurants in the city are available on most nights, the ordinary ones you have not heard of are not the thing to worry about. New York has thousands of restaurants and almost all of them will seat you, often the same evening. The anxiety a visitor arrives with is calibrated to about twenty rooms.
Those five at 100% are worth naming, because they are exactly the sort of restaurant people assume they need to book from another continent: Per Se, Essex, César, Shinzo Omakase and Sushi Hayashi Williamsburg. Cecchi's, Casa Mono and Golden Steer Steakhouse NYC read 97%. Le Bernardin, which has a fearsome reputation, read 61% for two and 74% for four.
At twenty-two of the New York restaurants we track, every date in the window was taken at the last reading. That is a measurement of the public calendar, not a claim that the room is empty: tables are taken within moments of release, so the people who get in are there at the release time or hear about a cancellation first.
Fourteen of the 22 opened nothing for a four-top either, which is as closed as a calendar gets. That group includes 4 Charles Prime Rib, The Polo Bar, Don Angie, Somssi, Bungalow, Ha's Snack Bar, Red Hook Tavern, The Corner Store, The Eighty Six and Raf's. If one of those is on your list, a reservation is not optional and turning up on spec will not work.
The tier below matters too, but differently. Carbone at 0%, Theodora at 0%, I Cavallini at 3%, Thai Diner at 27%, Wild Cherry at 0% and Via Carota at 0% are not impossible, they are intermittent. A reservation helps enormously, and if you do not have one there is usually a wait rather than a refusal.
The distinction matters more than the ranking. An intermittent room rewards an alert and a flexible date. A fully booked room rewards being on the page at the drop time, with an alert for the cancellation.
Reservation essential, 0% at both party sizes: 4 Charles Prime Rib, The Polo Bar, Don Angie, Somssi, Bungalow, Ha's Snack Bar, Red Hook Tavern, Una Pizza Napoletana, The Corner Store, The Eighty Six, Raf's, Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, Ramen By Ra, The Ambassadors Clubhouse.
Reservation essential for two, but open for four: Monkey Bar at 47%, Bistrot Ha at 13%, Torrisi at 10%, Semma at 10%, Oriana at 7%, I Sodi at 3%, Jeju Noodle Bar at 3%, The Four Horsemen at 0%.
Reservation strongly advised, intermittent: Carbone at 0%, Theodora at 0%, I Cavallini at 3%, Thai Diner at 27%, Wild Cherry at 0%, Via Carota at 0%.
Book on the day, usually fine: Per Se, Essex, César, Shinzo Omakase and Sushi Hayashi Williamsburg all at 100%, Cecchi's, Casa Mono and Golden Steer Steakhouse NYC at 97%, Le Bernardin at 61%.
Most of what makes New York feel impossible is that everyone wants the same ninety minutes, and we can measure exactly how little of that window ever comes free.
Across the New York rooms we score, 18% of logged openings fall in the 7:00 to 8:30 PM band. Twelve rooms have never logged a single opening inside it. Carbone has produced 18,139 openings on record and not one of them was prime time; its most common slot is 11:30 PM and 63% of what it releases is before 6 PM.
The pattern repeats at the top of the list. Monkey Bar's most common open slot is 11:45 AM, with 95% of its openings before 6 PM. I Sodi has never logged one after 6 PM. Via Carota's most common is 3:00 PM and Thai Diner's is 8:30 AM. At the other end, Torrisi puts 78% of its openings at 9 PM or later and Jeju Noodle Bar 39%.
So if your trip can tolerate an early or a late dinner, a meaningful share of the difficulty disappears, and you will be eating in the same room off the same menu. It also means our headline percentages read harder than they look: when we say a restaurant showed a table on 60% of dates, that includes the awkward hours, and the prime-time picture is always tighter than the number.
San Francisco behaves differently, which is worth knowing if both cities are on the trip. There, 36% of logged openings are prime time and only two rooms have never produced one. New York releases the edges of the evening. San Francisco releases dinner.
A 5:30 PM or 9:30 PM booking is dramatically easier than 7:30 PM almost everywhere.
Twelve of the 80 New York rooms we score have never logged an opening between 7:00 and 8:30 PM.
Twenty-one New York rooms are more open for four people than for two.
Bar and counter seats are frequently available when the dining room is not, and they never appear on any calendar.
Twenty-one of the New York restaurants we score are more available at four than at two, and fifteen are the other way round. It is a per-restaurant variable, not a rule, which is why it is worth checking rather than assuming.
The extremes are striking. Monkey Bar showed a bookable two-top on 50% of dates and a four-top on 47%. Torrisi and Semma both read 0% and 10%. Cote read 0% for two and 93% for four, meaning a group of four could have booked it on every date we looked. I Cavallini goes from 3% to 20%.
Sometimes the gap is policy rather than demand. In San Francisco, Z & Y reads 0% for two and 77% for four because the restaurant only takes advance bookings for parties of four or more. A couple there is not competing for a scarce table, they are looking at a calendar that was never open to them.
If you are travelling with another couple, combine and book the four-top. If you are two, the four-top figure is still useful context: it is usually the number behind the "we got in, why can't you" stories.
A large share of New York's hardest rooms hold seats back from the booking platforms entirely, for the bar, the counter or the walk-in line. Those seats are invisible to us and to every other tracker, because they never appear on a calendar at all.
This matters for a visitor more than for a resident. A restaurant showing 0% availability may still seat you at the bar at 5:45 PM on a Tuesday if you turn up and wait, and at many of these places the bar menu is the full menu. We will not guess at which rooms do this or on what terms, because a restaurant's walk-in policy is not something we measure and inventing one would be worse than leaving the gap.
So a 0% figure means "you could not have booked this online", not "you cannot eat here". Those are different sentences and the difference is often a good evening. The reliable move is to call the restaurant and ask, which takes two minutes and is the one research method no tracker replaces.
Every percentage on this page is the share of dates inside a restaurant's own booking window that had a bookable table, recorded by re-checking the live booking page around the clock at two party sizes. The reading is dated 19 October 2026. Cumulative counts, such as logged open slots and observed release events, keep growing because the raw snapshots are pruned while the counters continue.
We can write at this resolution only because the list is short. Table Alert advertises 62,198 restaurants. We watch 284, 84 in New York, 60 in San Francisco, 72 in Los Angeles and 68 in Chicago, which adds up to 61,530,416 availability checks so far. Nobody covering 62,198 rooms can tell you what any one of them does at 11:45 AM on a Tuesday, and we would rather answer that question about twenty rooms than fail to answer it about twenty thousand.
We also do not book. SnagRes watches Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms and tells you the moment a table opens, by email or text. It never holds a reservation, never books under another name and never resells one. TableSwap charges $75 per successful reservation, which is the practice New York's 2024 reservation law was written to stop. Staying on the alert side of that line is deliberate.
If you want the measured list rather than the summary, the hardest-reservations page ranks all 22 New York rooms with their release rules, and the guide to what to book before you fly turns those rules into a timeline you can set alarms against.
Measured answer: 30 of the 80 hardest New York restaurants were bookable on most dates at the last reading, and five on every date. Which 22 rooms genuinely require a booking, and which hour to ask for.
Keep reading: Booking New York from out of town · What to book before you fly · Restaurants you can actually book · The 22 hardest NYC rooms, and how to get in · Booking a just-opened restaurant
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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, or see the hardest tables right now.