Last updated . Source: SnagRes availability record, 61,530,416 checks across 284 restaurants through 19 October 2026. How we measure. Open dataset.
First check whether that room ever sells a 7 PM. In New York, 39 of the 76 restaurants we measure have a most-frequent opening of 9 PM or later, and 11 have never shown a prime-time table at all, so refreshing will not produce one. Your options are to take the seating the room actually offers, or to run an alert on the 7:00 to 8:30 PM window and be told the moment a cancellation appears. In San Francisco the answer is often simpler: at 16 of 56 rooms, prime time is the most frequently open slot.
Because 7:00 to 8:30 PM is the most in-demand block of the night, it is claimed first on release and it is the first thing to go when a room fills. At 11 New York restaurants, prime time is none of the open slots we have recorded: COTE 550, Carbone, Cote, I Sodi, L'Artusi, Minetta Tavern, Monkey Bar, Ramen By Ra, Thai Diner, Torrisi and Via Carota. What survives is early, before 6 PM, or late, 9 PM or later. At Minetta Tavern and Le Bernardin, bookable on 42% and 61% of dates, the most frequently open seating is 10:30 PM and 10:30 PM.
Match the request to the room. At early-skewing rooms like L'Artusi, where 91% of openings are before 6 PM, and Cotogna, at 95% early, ask for the earliest seating. At late-skewing rooms like Bong, at 73% late, or Izakaya Rintaro, at 73%, ask for 9:30 PM or later. At a room whose most frequent opening already falls in prime time, 50 of the 266 we measure, just ask for prime time.
Measured over every open slot we have recorded, the highest prime-time shares are, in San Francisco, Kiln (67%), Sons & Daughters (61%), Delfina (59%), Friends Only (57%), Benu (56%) and Ju-ni (56%), and in New York, Jua (59%), Huso (50%), Ito (50%), Kono (48%), Yamada (48%) and Sushi Ikumi (46%). Check each room's overall availability too: Benu is at 56% prime but only opens on 30% of dates, so the slot is good and the chances are fewer.
Yes, but mostly as cancellations rather than fresh releases, and they surface at arbitrary hours. That is why an alert beats manual refreshing: a table dropped at 3:40 PM on a Wednesday lives for a few minutes. SnagRes watches the calendar and texts you when a slot appears. We never book, hold or resell the table. You complete the reservation yourself, in your own account, at the restaurant's own price.
Measure it and see: the median San Francisco room leaves 31% of its open slots inside 7:00 to 8:30 PM against 13% for the median New York room. 1 San Francisco rooms have never shown a prime-time table, against 11 in New York, and prime time is the most frequently open slot at 16 of 56 San Francisco restaurants against 5 of 76 in New York.
The city decides more than the restaurant's fame does. Across the 266 restaurants where we have enough seating-time data to answer, the median San Francisco room leaves 31% of its open slots inside the 7:00 to 8:30 PM window, and the median New York room leaves 13%. Those are two different answers to the same question, and almost every guide on this subject gives only the New York one.
The reason to trust the split is the sample behind it. We have recorded 465,235,816 sightings of an open seating time across the 284 restaurants we follow, and we log the clock time of every one of them, for a party of two and a party of four, every time we re-read a calendar. Prime time here means a seating from 7:00 to 8:30 PM, the stretch most people actually want. Early means before 6 PM and late means 9 PM or later.
In New York the middle of the night is where availability goes to die. Of the 76 New York rooms with enough data, the single most frequently open slot is 9 PM or later at 39 of them and inside prime time at only 5. 11 of them have never shown a prime-time table at all.
In San Francisco the shape is different. Of 56 rooms, the most frequently open slot falls inside prime time at 16 of them and at 9 PM or later at 26, and 1 have never shown a prime-time table. If you want a 7:30 in San Francisco, there is a measured list of rooms that mostly sell you one, and it is further down this page.
Median share of open slots falling in 7:00 to 8:30 PM: New York 13%, San Francisco 31%.
New York rooms whose most frequent opening is 9 PM or later: 39 of 76.
San Francisco rooms whose most frequent opening is prime time: 16 of 56.
Rooms that have never once shown a prime-time table: 11 in New York, 1 in San Francisco.
At the hardest New York tables the 7:00 to 8:30 PM block is claimed first and comes back last, so what survives long enough for you to find sits at the edges of service. The numbers below are the share of every open slot we have recorded at that restaurant, as of 19 October 2026, not the restaurant's service hours. Those are opposite things at a hard room: Carbone's most frequently open slot is 11:30 AM precisely because 8 PM never lasts.
The striking cases are not the rooms that are hard to book at all. Minetta Tavern showed a bookable two-top on 42% of the dates we checked, and Le Bernardin on 61%, which makes both of them genuinely available. Neither one reliably has a table at dinner. In 2,198,992 recorded slots at Minetta the most frequent opening is 10:30 PM and prime time rounds to 0%, and Le Bernardin sits at 1% with its most frequent opening at 10:30 PM.
A second group is stranger still. At L'Artusi, 91% of the open slots we have logged are before 6 PM and the most frequent one is 2:30 PM. At Monkey Bar it is 7:00 AM, with 100% of openings early. Those calendars are not offering you a compromise dinner. They are offering the afternoon, and a page that told you to take an early seating there without saying so would be wasting your evening.
This is what the availability percentage on its own hides, and why we publish the seating-time distribution next to it. Open on most nights and open at a time you can use are separate facts, and only one of them is in a directory listing.
Cote, Flatiron: 0% of open slots in prime time, 20% early and 80% late. Most frequent opening 11:00 PM.
Minetta Tavern, Greenwich Village: 0% prime across 2,198,992 slots, most frequent opening 10:30 PM, and still bookable on 42% of dates.
Le Bernardin: 1% prime, 21% early, 78% late, peaking at 10:30 PM.
Carbone, Greenwich Village: 0% prime, most frequent opening 11:30 AM.
L'Artusi, West Village: 0% prime and 91% early, peaking at 2:30 PM.
Lilia, Williamsburg: 6% prime, 41% early, 49% late, peaking at 9:30 PM.
Bong, Crown Heights: 9% prime and 73% late. Plan on 10:30 PM.
There is a list of restaurants whose most frequently open slot is a 7 or an 8, and asking for prime time at one of them is not optimism. Counted that way, it is 16 rooms in San Francisco against 5 in New York, and San Francisco also books on a different mix of platforms: 27 on OpenTable, 15 on Tock, 10 on Resy and 8 on SevenRooms.
Ranked by the share of their open slots that fall in prime time, the San Francisco leaders are Kiln (67%), Sons & Daughters (61%), Delfina (59%), Friends Only (57%), Benu (56%) and Ju-ni (56%). Delfina in the Mission was bookable on 100% of the dates we checked, with 59% of its open slots inside prime time and a 7:15 PM peak. Niku Steakhouse in SoMa is at 83% available and 47% prime, peaking at 8:30 PM.
Around the Financial District and the Embarcadero, where a lot of these dinners actually happen, Akiko's reads 87% available with 38% of its open slots in prime time, Angler 87% with 25%, and Boulevard 87% with 34% and a 7:45 PM peak. Zuni Cafe is at 83% available, 23% prime, peaking at 9:00 PM.
New York has its own short list, and it is worth knowing precisely because so much of the city does not behave this way. By prime-time share it runs Jua (59%), Huso (50%), Ito (50%), Kono (48%), Yamada (48%) and Sushi Ikumi (46%). Golden Steer Steakhouse in Greenwich Village was bookable on 97% of dates with 30% of its open slots inside prime time. Nubeluz in NoMad reads 80% and 15%, peaking at 10:30 PM. ICCA in Tribeca reads 77% and 33%. Huso reads 55% and 50%, and Jua 40% and 59%.
One honest note on the tight rooms. Benu opened on only 30% of dates, and Quince on 40%, but when either one does open, 56% and 40% of what it offers is prime time. A low availability figure does not imply a bad slot. It means fewer chances at a good one, which is a different problem and a different tactic.
San Francisco, highest prime-time share: Kiln (67%), Sons & Daughters (61%), Delfina (59%), Friends Only (57%), Benu (56%) and Ju-ni (56%).
New York, highest prime-time share: Jua (59%), Huso (50%), Ito (50%), Kono (48%), Yamada (48%) and Sushi Ikumi (46%).
Delfina, Mission: 100% of dates open, 59% of slots prime, peak 7:15 PM.
Niku Steakhouse, SoMa: 83% open, 47% prime. Akiko's, Financial District: 87% open, 38% prime.
Golden Steer Steakhouse, Greenwich Village: 97% open, 30% prime, peak 10:00 PM.
Benu, SoMa: 30% open but 56% prime. Quince, Jackson Square: 40% open but 40% prime.
Two lanes, and picking one deliberately is how you end up eating. The first is to stop fighting the distribution and take the seating the room genuinely offers. At Cotogna the most frequent opening is 3:00 PM and 95% of openings are before 6 PM. At Bong it is 10:30 PM. At Izakaya Rintaro, 73% of openings are 9 PM or later. The kitchen does not cook differently at 5:45 or at 10:15, and the table is one that actually exists.
The second lane is for when only prime time will do. Because the 7:00 to 8:30 PM block disappears first and rarely reopens on the release, the prime-time tables you can get almost always arrive as cancellations at unpredictable hours. A four-top dropped at 3:40 PM on a Wednesday is a real table, live for a few minutes, and invisible unless something is watching. That is not a problem effort solves. It is a problem attention solves, which is why alerts exist.
The release hour is still worth knowing, because it is the one predictable moment. We log release events rather than trusting published policy, and the contrast tells you what you are walking into. Kokkari logged 68 release events across 59 observed days, which is a calendar edge rolling quietly forward. Carbone logged 581 in 63 days and Monkey Bar 483, because at those rooms a date flickers open and shut over and over as people grab and drop seats. A room in the second group is one to watch, not one to catch.
A word on what we do not do. SnagRes never books, holds or resells a reservation. You get a text, you complete the booking yourself in your own account at the restaurant's own price. Prime time is exactly where that line matters: brokers resell the 8:00 PM Saturday, and TableSwap charges $75 for a successful reservation, which is the practice New York's 2024 reservation law was written to stop. An alert puts you at the front of the queue. It does not put a middleman between you and the room.
Book the edge seating the room actually offers, so you are holding a real table.
Run a prime-time alert alongside it for the slot you wanted.
Check a four-top as well as a two-top. The two diverge sharply at some rooms.
Know whether the room is a quiet calendar edge or a release-event scramble before you plan around the release.
Every restaurant we follow is re-read around the clock: every date in the booking window, for a party of two and a party of four, recording the clock time of every slot that is open. That is 61,530,416 availability checks and 465,235,816 open-slot sightings so far, and the per-restaurant percentages on this page are that restaurant's own share of them, dated 19 October 2026. City figures are medians and counts across the rooms in that city that carry a seating-time record.
The bands are fixed. Prime time is 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM inclusive, early is anything before 6 PM, and late is 9 PM or later. The two shoulders, 6:00 to 6:59 PM and 8:31 to 8:59 PM, sit in none of the three, which is why the numbers on a given restaurant do not always add to 100. A room reading 60% prime, 0% early and 0% late is selling almost everything in those shoulders and the prime block.
These are shares of sightings, not of dates, so a slot that stays open for three hours counts more than one that lasts ninety seconds. That weighting is deliberate: it describes what you find when you look at an arbitrary moment, which is when people look. It also means a figure of 0% is a strong claim. It says that across every read we have taken, that window was never once the thing left over.
Rooms with too few recorded slots are left out of the seating-time analysis entirely rather than reported thinly, which is why this page covers 266 restaurants rather than all 284; the newest cities join as their slot records fill in. Counts are cumulative and keep growing, because the raw snapshots behind them are pruned after a few days while the counters continue. When a number here moves, it moves because a restaurant changed.
Keep reading: Catch a cancellation · The easiest night to book · Client dinners in New York · Client dinners in San Francisco · The hardest NYC reservations · Set a prime-time alert
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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: see the hardest tables right now.