Last updated . Source: SnagRes availability record, 61,530,416 checks across 284 restaurants through 19 October 2026. How we measure. Open dataset.
Wednesday, by a small margin. Comparing only the nights a restaurant is actually open, a check on a Wednesday found a bookable two-top 54.1% of the time, against 46.1% on a Saturday, the hardest night. The spread from best night to worst is 8.0 points, so the effect is real and small. The same measurement inside a single restaurant swings 23 points at the median, which is the number worth acting on.
Less than you have been told. Once closures are removed the nights rank Wednesday 54.1%, Thursday 53.4%, Tuesday 52.6%, Sunday 52.4%, Monday 51.5%, Friday 49.3% and Saturday 46.1%, a best-to-worst spread of 8.0 points, and Tuesday finishes third. The raw data appears to show a 16.7-point gap, and most of that is restaurants being closed rather than being full.
Of the 284 restaurants with enough weekday history in our study, 109 have never once shown a table on a Monday and 68 have never shown one on a Sunday, which is what a closing day looks like in this data. By weekday: Monday 109, Sunday 68, Tuesday 47, Wednesday 15, Saturday 10, Friday 6 and Thursday 5.
Rarely across the city, often within one restaurant. The city-wide gap between the best and worst night is 8.0 points, which is not worth a substitution. But the median restaurant we track swings 23 points between its own easiest and hardest night, and some swing far more: Gjelina, Venice: 99% on Saturday against 0% on Thursday. Look up the room, not the city.
No. At the harder rooms the seating time dominates. At Le Bernardin, Cote and Minetta Tavern the slot most often left open is 10:30 PM, 11:00 PM and 10:30 PM respectively. Moving to an earlier or later seating changes your odds far more than moving from a Saturday to a Wednesday.
Comparing only the nights a restaurant is actually open, a check on a Wednesday found a bookable two-top 54.1% of the time and a check on a Saturday 46.1%. Wednesday is the easiest night of the week, Saturday is the hardest, and the entire spread between them is 8.0 points. That is the honest city-wide answer, and it is a much smaller number than the advice you have been given.
The full ranking, easiest first: Wednesday 54.1%, Thursday 53.4%, Tuesday 52.6%, Sunday 52.4%, Monday 51.5%, Friday 49.3% and Saturday 46.1%. Neighbouring nights sit within a point or two of each other, which is noise you could not act on. Nothing in this list is worth rearranging a week for.
Two things make the ranking useful anyway. The first is that it does not simply confirm the folklore: Tuesday, the night the advice always names, finishes third of seven. The second is that the raw version of this same measurement claims a gap of 16.7 points, and the reason it is wrong is worth understanding before you trust any weekday claim, ours included.
Every figure on this page comes from re-reading the same calendars around the clock, 61,530,416 availability checks so far across the 284 restaurants we follow. 284 of them carry enough weekday history to compare: 84 in New York, 60 in San Francisco, 72 in Los Angeles and 68 in Chicago. Rooms in newer cities join the comparison once they have enough weeks behind them.
Every night, easiest first: Wednesday 54.1%, Thursday 53.4%, Tuesday 52.6%, Sunday 52.4%, Monday 51.5%, Friday 49.3% and Saturday 46.1%.
Spread from best night to worst: 8.0 points.
Take every check we hold without adjusting anything and Monday looks catastrophic: 35.8% of Monday checks found a table against 52.4% of Thursday checks. That is a 16.7-point spread, and it is the shape of the number most weekday advice is built on.
Most of it is restaurants being shut. 109 of the rooms we track have never once shown a table on a Monday across a substantial sample, and 68 have never shown one on a Sunday. On Friday, 6 are in that position. A dark dining room contributes thousands of checks that find nothing, and those checks pile up on the nights it is dark.
So the raw figure is not measuring how hard a night is to book. It is measuring how much of the city is closed that night. Once each restaurant is compared only against the nights it actually opens, 260 restaurant-weekdays drop out of the comparison and the 16.7-point spread becomes 8.0.
14 rooms are deliberately left in rather than excluded, because they have never shown a two-top on any weekday at all: 4 Charles Prime Rib, Atomix, Bavette's Bar & Boeuf, Feld, Fu Hui Hua, Hayato, Holbox, Naides, Or'esh, The Corner Store, The Eighty Six, The Polo Bar, Z & Y and n/naka. Those are the hardest tables in the study, not closed ones, and dropping them would flatter every percentage on this page.
Rooms never seen open on each weekday: Monday 109, Sunday 68, Tuesday 47, Wednesday 15, Saturday 10, Friday 6 and Thursday 5.
Raw spread, closures included: 16.7 points. Adjusted spread: 8.0.
City averages are the wrong altitude for this question. Of the 152 restaurants where we can rank the weekdays inside one room, the median gap between a room's easiest night and its hardest is 23 points, the mean is 30, and 58 of them swing by 30 points or more. The effect you can actually use is the one inside the restaurant you want, and it is several times the size of the city-wide effect.
The individual patterns are also nothing like the average. The widest swings we measure: Gjelina, Venice: 99% on Saturday against 0% on Thursday. Lula Cafe, Logan Square: 100% on Sunday against 7% on Tuesday. Republique, Mid-City: 100% on Friday against 7% on Saturday. Le Bernardin, which is the room people assume is uniformly impossible, reads 95% on Wednesday against 36% on Saturday.
And the best night is not always midweek. Wednesday is the easiest night at the most rooms, 35 of the 152, but Friday, Saturday or Sunday is the easiest night at 50 of them. Atera reads 100% on Friday against 44% on Thursday. If you picked a room on its worst night because a guide told you which nights to avoid, the guide cost you the table.
This is the part a large directory cannot do. Table Alert advertises 62,198 restaurants. Nothing watching 62,198 rooms is checking any one of them often enough to know that Gjelina swings the way it does across the week, because that finding needs thousands of repeated reads of one calendar rather than one read of thousands. We gave up coverage to be able to answer at this resolution, and the trade is the whole point.
Gjelina, Venice: 99% on Saturday against 0% on Thursday.
Lula Cafe, Logan Square: 100% on Sunday against 7% on Tuesday.
Republique, Mid-City: 100% on Friday against 7% on Saturday.
Rustic Canyon, Santa Monica: 100% on Friday against 11% on Tuesday.
Ever, West Loop: 99% on Thursday against 17% on Saturday.
Saturday reads 46.1% and finishes seventh of seven; Friday reads 49.3% and finishes sixth. Whatever the order, the gap to the easiest night is a few points, not the rout the advice predicts. Two unremarkable things explain it once closures are out of the way.
Restaurants staff and seat for their busiest nights. A room running its full floor on Friday has more tables in existence than the same room running lean on a Monday, so supply moves with demand and the ratio between them is steadier than the raw counts suggest. A busy night is not the same as a full night.
The second is that midweek demand is no longer low. The advice to go on a Tuesday has been repeated for long enough that a lot of people follow it, and they are competing for a night when 47 of the 284 rooms with a weekday record are dark and the open ones are often running a reduced floor.
None of which makes Saturday at 8:00 PM easy. Saturday is the hardest night at 59 of the 152 rooms we can rank inside the room, and the day that is hardest at the most rooms is Saturday. The folklore is not baseless. It is just a smaller term than people think, and it is swamped by which restaurant you picked and what time you are willing to eat.
Treat night of the week as a tiebreak rather than a strategy. If two dates work equally well, take the Wednesday. If choosing a night means giving up the restaurant, keep the restaurant: 8.0 points is not worth a substitution, and 23 points inside one room is only available to you if you stay in that room.
Then do the two checks that are worth more than the whole weekday question. First, confirm your first choice is even open that night. 109 of the rooms we track never open on a Monday, and an itinerary built around a Monday dinner at one of them has a problem no booking tactic solves. Second, look at what time the room actually opens, because that effect is far larger than the day. The most frequently open seating is 10:30 PM at Le Bernardin, 11:00 PM at Cote and 10:30 PM at Minetta Tavern, which means the night you chose matters much less than whether you will take the hour the room actually has.
Party size is worth a look for the same reason. We measure a two-top and a four-top separately, and they diverge at some rooms: Cote reads 0% for two and 93% for four, Monkey Bar 50% for two and 47% for four. Checking both costs nothing and occasionally turns a closed door into an open one.
When the room, the night and the time are all fixed and nothing is available, the table arrives later as a cancellation at an hour nobody would choose. That is the only part of this that cannot be solved by planning, and it is what alerting is for. SnagRes watches the calendar and texts you when a table appears. We never book, hold or resell a reservation: you complete it yourself, in your own account, at the restaurant's own price.
Check your first choice is open that night before building a plan around it.
Wednesday is marginally best and Saturday worst once closures are removed.
Do not trade the restaurant you want for a night worth 8.0 points.
Look up the room's own best night. The median room swings 23 points across the week.
Seating time and party size both move the odds more than the day does.
Every restaurant we track is re-checked continuously. Each check records the weekday of the date being checked and whether a bookable table for two was found, and the raw figures above pool every such check, 61,530,416 availability checks in all.
The adjusted figures exclude, per restaurant, any weekday with at least 40 checks that has never once shown a table, which is what a closing day looks like from outside. Restaurants that have never shown a table on any weekday stay in, for the reason given above. Within-room rankings use each room's own easiest and hardest night from its recent record, which is why that section quotes 152 restaurants rather than 284. Every figure here is recomputed each time the facts are rebuilt, so the winning night can change.
An earlier version of this page reported the same underlying counts with the weekdays labelled one day late. It named Tuesday as the big closure day and Friday as the easiest night. The counts were right and the labels were not. They are corrected here, and the finding that survived the fix is the one that was never about the labels: the city-wide weekday effect is small, and the per-restaurant effect is not.
Two honest limits. A closing day and a permanently sold-out weekday are indistinguishable from the outside, so a few of the 109 Monday exclusions may be rooms that open and never have a table. And these are percentages of checks rather than of dates, so a table that sits open for hours counts more than one that lasts ninety seconds. That weighting is deliberate, because it matches what you find when you look at a random moment, which is when people actually look.
Keep reading: Seating time beats day of week · Booking for four is not harder · When NYC restaurants release dates · Picking a night for a client dinner · Which platform has the hardest tables · How we measure availability
Browse all restaurant reservation guides
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.