Last updated . Source: SnagRes availability record, 61,530,416 checks across 284 restaurants through 19 October 2026. How we measure. Open dataset.
It depends entirely on the room, and the spread is enormous. Among the New York counters we track, the hardest are Sushi Ikumi (33%) and Yamada (37%), while the easiest are Shinzo Omakase (100%), Sushi Hayashi Williamsburg (100%) and ICCA (77%). The 10 New York Japanese rooms average 51% availability. New York omakase concentrates on Resy, which uses timed daily releases, so the hardest rooms reward being ready at the drop or catching a cancellation through an alert.
Find out whether the room sells prepaid Tock tickets or runs a Resy timed release, then match your effort to its open share. Above 50%, open the app and book a flexible weeknight. Below it, set an alert, because the seats sell in seconds at release and everything afterwards is a cancellation appearing at an unpredictable hour. Ask for the early seating: at counters like Ito, Kono and Yamada there are very few times to choose from.
The most open counters we track, from the top: Shinzo Omakase (100%), Sushi Hayashi Williamsburg (100%), Akiko's (87%) and ICCA (77%). All of them combine a real reputation with a seat that is usually waiting.
San Francisco is the easier city: its 6 Japanese rooms average 70% availability against 51% in New York. Akiko's reads 87% on OpenTable, Ju-ni 70% on Tock, Wako 67% and Showa 3%. Most of the city's counters sell prepaid Tock tickets, so expect to pay for the meal when you book.
Because a counter sells seatings rather than times. Ito's open slots run from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM across 508,155 samples, Kono's and Yamada's from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM, and Showa's earliest and latest are both 6:00 PM across 174 sampled slots. A party that can move ninety minutes has far better odds than one that cannot.
Often, and it is the most underused tactic on this page. At Umeko, 92% of open slots are before 6 PM and the most frequently open time is 2:45 PM. ICCA opens from 12:30 PM, Sushi Ikumi from 11:45 AM. The same chef serves the same courses either way.
No. Raku is a small East Village room known for handmade udon, booking on SevenRooms, and its availability profile matches: openings from 3:00 PM to 9:00 PM with 54% before 6 PM. It reads 47%, but it only opens 14 days ahead, so dates past that edge were never on sale.
Mostly the start of the week. Check each room's record: Ito's Sunday and Monday record is 0 and 0 openings, Umeko's Monday 0, Tsukimi's Monday and Tuesday 0 and 0, and ICCA's Wednesday 0. Pointing an alert at a closed night means waiting forever.
We follow 32 Japanese and sushi rooms across New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago and have run 7,256,124 availability checks against their calendars, part of 61,530,416 checks across the 284 restaurants we track. The open share is the percentage of dates in the current booking window with a bookable seat, read on 19 October 2026, and the opening and slot counts are cumulative. A 0% reading means a seat almost never stays open long enough for an ordinary person to find and take it.
An omakase counter does not sell you a time, it sells you a seating, and that one structural fact explains most of what goes wrong when people try to book one. At Ito in Tribeca we have sampled 508,155 open slots, and they run from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM and nothing outside that. At Kono it is 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM. At Showa in San Francisco, across 174 sampled open slots, the earliest and the latest are both 6:00 PM. The 7:30 PM you might hold out for often does not exist.
The second thing to know is the payment model, which splits by platform. Tock counters sell prepaid tickets, so you pay for the meal in full at the moment you book, and several of the San Francisco counters we follow, Showa, Wako and Ju-ni, work that way. The Resy counters run a timed release instead, dropping seats at a set hour each day, and the Tock rooms that use a monthly drop, such as Tsukimi, which opens 1st of the month for the following month at 3 PM, put a whole month of inventory on sale at once.
The reputation that every omakase is impossible is simply wrong. We follow 32 Japanese and sushi rooms across New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago and have run 7,256,124 availability checks against their calendars, part of 61,530,416 checks across the 284 restaurants we track. As of 19 October 2026, the open share of those rooms runs from Hayato (0%) to Hinodeya (100%). Omakase is not one level of difficulty. It is a full spectrum, and much of it is genuinely within reach.
Among the New York counters we track, the hardest right now are Sushi Ikumi (33%), Yamada (37%) and Umeko (47%), the share of dates with a bookable seat for two. The hard tier is a New York tier, and it sits mostly on Resy, where a timed daily drop rewards whoever is watching at the exact minute rather than whoever plans furthest ahead.
The figure next to each name is the share of dates in the current booking window with a bookable seat, so lower is harder. Read it alongside the window each room actually sells, because a counter that only books two weeks out cannot fill days it has not put on sale yet.
Yamada (New York, Resy): 37% for a two-top and 23% for a four-top, opening 20 days ahead.
Sushi Ikumi (New York, Resy): 33% for a two-top and 27% for a four-top, 192,192 openings logged across 640,967 checks, opening 14 days ahead at midnight.
Ito (New York, Resy): 50% for a two-top and 47% for a four-top, opening 21 days ahead at noon.
Kono (New York, Resy): 57% for a two-top and 57% for a four-top, easiest on a Wednesday at 62% and hardest on a Monday at 30%.
Raku (New York, SevenRooms): 47% for both party sizes, opening 14 days ahead, and a handmade udon room rather than a sushi counter.
Umeko (New York, Resy): 47% for a two-top and 43% for a four-top, with 647 release events observed across 61 days.
The most open counters we track, from the top: Shinzo Omakase (100%), Sushi Hayashi Williamsburg (100%), Akiko's (87%), ICCA (77%) and Ju-ni (70%). Shinzo Omakase in the East Village has logged 655,708 openings across 656,990 checks, and Sushi Hayashi in Williamsburg 651,838 across 653,850. Those are not hard bookings dressed up as easy ones. They are rooms with a seat waiting most of the time.
ICCA in Tribeca reads 77% on Tock, with its easiest night reading 100% and its hardest 48%. Akiko's in San Francisco reads 87%, on OpenTable rather than Tock, and its easiest night reads 100%. Across every room tagged Japanese, San Francisco averages 70% against 51% in New York.
The point of publishing both halves of this list is that the question people actually have is rarely about one room. It is about eating at a good counter this month. Seen that way, the answer is easy and nobody is telling it: book one of the open counters, and keep the alert for the room that will not open.
Shinzo Omakase (New York, Resy): 100%, 655,708 openings across 656,990 checks.
Sushi Hayashi Williamsburg (New York, Resy): 100%, 651,838 openings across 653,850 checks.
ICCA (New York, Tock): 77% for two, easiest night 100%, hardest 48%, most open slot 5:30 PM.
Akiko's (San Francisco, OpenTable): 87% for two, easiest night 100%, hardest 89%.
Ju-ni (San Francisco, Tock): 70%, opening 1st of prev. month at 10 AM.
Wako (San Francisco, Tock): 67%, and Showa (San Francisco, Tock): 3%.
Tsukimi (New York, Tock): 63% for two, easiest on a Thursday at 100%.
This is the most useful thing on the page and the thing no aggregate score can show you. Sort our slot samples by time and the counters fall into a pattern: an early seating, a late seating, and little in between.
Ito's open slots run from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM, Kono's from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM, Yamada's from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM, and Ju-ni's in San Francisco from 5:30 PM to 8:15 PM. Showa's earliest and latest are the same time, 6:00 PM, across every one of its 174 sampled slots. Sushi Ikumi adds lunch from 11:45 AM to its dinner seatings.
Two consequences follow. The first is that a party which can move ninety minutes has far better odds than a party that cannot, because there are only a couple of doors. The second is that the usual advice about avoiding prime time can be meaningless here: 50% of Ito's open slots and 48% of Kono's fall inside the 7:00 to 8:30 PM window because their late seating is 8:30 PM. At a counter, off-peak means the early seating, not a quieter hour.
The rooms with a wide spread of times are the exception rather than the norm. Raku runs from 3:00 PM to 9:00 PM, ICCA from 12:30 PM to 8:30 PM, and both are correspondingly easier to book. A restaurant with many possible times has many chances to have one free.
Ito: 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM, across 508,155 sampled open slots.
Kono: 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM. Yamada: 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM.
Showa: 6:00 PM to 6:00 PM, across 174 sampled slots.
Ju-ni: 5:30 PM to 8:15 PM.
ICCA and Raku are the wide-spread exceptions, from 12:30 PM and 3:00 PM respectively.
Umeko is the cleanest example of a room that is easy in a way no ranking captures. Of the 3,142,929 open slots we have sampled there, 92% are before 6 PM, and the single most frequently open time is 2:45 PM. Only 5% of its open slots are prime time. Umeko is not a hard reservation. It is a hard dinner reservation and a straightforward mid-afternoon one.
The same door is open elsewhere. ICCA opens from 12:30 PM. Sushi Hayashi's most frequently open slot is 1:00 PM. Sushi Ikumi opens from 11:45 AM.
For a tasting counter this matters more than it would at a normal restaurant, because the meal is the same either way. The same chef serves the same fish across the same courses in the afternoon as at 8:30 PM. Moving the request to lunch is the single cheapest way to turn a hard omakase into an easy one, and it costs you nothing but the hour.
Umeko: 92% of open slots before 6 PM, most frequently 2:45 PM, and 5% at prime time.
Wako: 34% of open slots before 6 PM, opening from 5:30 PM.
Sushi Ikumi: lunch from 11:45 AM alongside its dinner seatings.
Sushi Hayashi Williamsburg: most often 1:00 PM, with 48% of openings before 6 PM.
A surprising number of these rooms are simply closed on the days people assume are hard. Check the room's own record before you pick a night: Ito's Sunday and Monday record is 0 and 0 openings, Umeko's Monday 0, Tsukimi's Monday and Tuesday 0 and 0. A closed night is not a hard night, and an alert pointed at one will wait forever.
Among the nights that do open, Tuesday produced 68,494 of Umeko's 277,610 openings, against 14,302 on a Saturday, five to one on the same calendar. Kono peaks on a Wednesday, Sushi Ikumi on a Thursday, and ICCA on a Thursday, which reads 100% availability.
Raku is evenly distributed across the week: its 105,526 openings run from 30% of checks on its thinnest night to 40% on its best. When a room opens equally on every night, the competition is not for a table, it is for a particular hour.
Ito: Tuesday is its best night; Sunday and Monday returned 0 and 0 openings.
Sushi Ikumi: Thursday is its best night, Friday its thinnest.
ICCA: Wednesday returned 0 openings in 552 checks, and its best night, Thursday, reads 100%.
Umeko: Tuesday produced 68,494 openings against 14,302 on a Saturday.
Raku: between 30% and 40% of checks on every night it opens.
Raku is a clear case of a number that can read worse than the restaurant. It shows 47% availability over 30 days, which sounds middling until you notice that Raku only opens 14 days ahead. Dates past its window could not have been bookable no matter how empty the room was, and it showed 14 open dates in all.
The same correction applies to Sushi Ikumi, which opens 14 days ahead at midnight, and Yamada, 20 days ahead. Scoring unsold days as unavailable is accurate arithmetic and a misleading impression, and it is worth saying plainly because most published availability scores do exactly that without mentioning it.
Raku also deserves a correction of the record. It is a small East Village room known for handmade udon, on SevenRooms, not an omakase counter, and its slot profile shows it: openings from 3:00 PM to 9:00 PM with 54% before 6 PM and 5:00 PM its single most frequent opening. It belongs on a list of Japanese rooms worth knowing, not on a list of hard sushi counters.
This is the kind of distinction that disappears when a service lists tens of thousands of restaurants and prints one percentage per room. Table Alert advertises 62,198 restaurants. We watch 284, and we would rather spend a section explaining what one number means than publish a score we know reads wrong.
Split the list in two and treat each half differently. For anything above 50%, open the app, pick a flexible weeknight and book: the open counters seat on most dates, so you are spending effort on a problem you do not have. Check whether the room takes prepaid tickets first, because a Tock counter wants the full price of the meal at the moment you confirm.
For the hard end, refreshing by hand rarely works. A counter of this size releases a handful of seats, sells them in seconds, and everything afterwards is a cancellation surfacing at an unpredictable moment. That is the gap an alert fills. SnagRes re-checks these rooms across Resy, Tock, OpenTable and SevenRooms around the clock and texts or emails you the instant a seat opens, so you are not the one refreshing.
We never book the seat for you. You get the alert and a link, and the reservation ends up in your own name on the restaurant's own platform. Services that charge for the booking itself, such as the roughly 75 dollars per successful reservation TableSwap publishes on top of its subscription, attach a fee to a restaurant seat, which is the practice New York wrote its 2024 reservation law to stop. We never offer or arrange a booking, so there is nothing to resell.
The reason we can tell you that Showa has a single seating and Umeko is an afternoon restaurant is that the list is short on purpose. Nobody watching tens of thousands of rooms can tell you what time a particular sushi counter opens at, which night it never opens on, or how far ahead its calendar actually reaches.
Above 50% open share, book directly. Below it, set an alert and stop refreshing.
Ask for the early seating. At most of these counters it is one of very few times that exist.
Try lunch. Umeko at 2:45 PM, ICCA from 12:30 PM and Sushi Ikumi from 11:45 AM are all easier than their dinners.
Check the window before judging the score: Raku opens 14 days ahead, Sushi Ikumi 14 days ahead at midnight, Yamada 20 days ahead.
Avoid the closed nights, which for these rooms are mostly Sunday and Monday.
Expect to prepay on Tock, where a ticket is the reservation.
Keep reading: Japanese restaurants, live availability · The hardest Japanese tables in SF · How to get a Raku reservation · Why SF omakase runs on Tock · How to get Michelin-star reservations · Set an availability 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: last-minute tables in NYC tonight, or see the hardest tables right now.