Last updated . Source: SnagRes availability record, 61,530,416 checks across 284 restaurants through 19 October 2026. How we measure. Open dataset.
To use Resy, create a free account, save a payment method, then search by date, party size and time to see what is open and book it instantly. For a hard restaurant, the two facts that decide the outcome are the hour that room releases new dates and how far ahead its calendar reaches, both of which the restaurant sets rather than Resy.
Resy is a free reservation platform owned by American Express, and 67 of the 284 restaurants we track book through it. Most run a rolling window where one new date opens at the far edge of the calendar each day, at an hour the restaurant chooses. We have confirmed the schedule for 56 of our 67 Resy rooms, and no two of them behave identically.
There is no Resy-wide opening time. Of the 50 Resy restaurants we track that publish an hour, 17 open at midnight, 14 at 10 AM, nine at 9 AM and five at noon, with outliers at 7 AM, 8 AM, 11 AM and 10 PM. Our measured drop hour matches the restaurant's published hour at 33 of the 47 Resy rooms where we hold both.
It depends on the restaurant, and 30 days is the most common answer rather than the rule. Among the 50 Resy rooms whose window we have confirmed, 12 open 30 days ahead, eight open 14 days, seven open 21 days and six open 28 days, with a range from six days to 60. A calendar that has not opened yet looks exactly like a sold-out one.
Yes, as a free single-slot waitlist. You request one restaurant, one date and one party size, and Resy notifies you if a matching table appears. Its limits are that it covers only Resy, which is 67 of the 284 restaurants we track and just 13 of the 62 we watch in San Francisco, and that it cannot watch a flexible range of nights or party sizes.
Yes. Browsing, booking and Resy Notify are all free, and holding a standard reservation costs nothing. Some restaurants attach a deposit or sell specific seats as prepaid tickets, but that is the restaurant's decision rather than a Resy fee.
Because at the hardest rooms the release is not producing a table you can reach. Sixteen of the 67 Resy restaurants we track have never shown us a bookable two-top on any date. Carbone showed one on 0% of 588,600 checks, and not one of its open slots has ever fallen between 7 and 8:30 PM. Missing the drop is the normal outcome, not a mistake.
Sometimes, and not reliably. Across every restaurant we measure, a four-top is easier to find than a two-top at 31 of them and harder at 26. Cote goes from 70% of days open for two to 93% for four, while Lilia drops from 63% to 33%. It is a per-restaurant question, and both numbers are on each restaurant's page.
Watch for returns. Across the 64 Resy restaurants where we hold release data we have recorded 4,366 separate openings, far more than one a day per room, and most of them are tables coming back rather than the scheduled drop. Resy Notify covers one Resy slot; SnagRes watches Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms and messages you when any table opens, without ever booking it.
Resy is the American Express one. You probably installed it for somebody's birthday dinner and it has lived on your second home screen ever since. It is free, it is where most of New York's hardest tables sit, and of the 284 restaurants we track, 67 book through it.
Here is the part almost nobody tells you. Resy is not the gatekeeper. The restaurant is. Resy is the counter. The restaurant decides what goes on it and when, and it picks both its own release hour and its own booking window. Neither is a Resy setting you can look up in one place.
Most rooms run a rolling window, which means one new date appears at the far edge of the calendar each day. Not a fresh month on the first. One night, once a day, at an hour the restaurant chose and largely did not advertise.
Which is why the whole thing feels arbitrary when you check whenever you happen to think of it. The Saturday you want is not sitting there waiting to be found. It does not exist, then it exists, then it is gone. You are not slow. You are turning up on the wrong day, repeatedly.
Midnight is the most confidently repeated wrong answer in New York dining. It is the single most common release hour and it is still a minority: of the 50 Resy rooms we track that publish an hour, 17 open at midnight and 33 do not.
The rest scatter. Fourteen at 10 AM, nine at 9 AM, five at noon, a pair at 7 AM, and stragglers at 8 AM, 11 AM and, for reasons known only to them, 10 PM.
And you do not have to take the restaurant's word for it, which is the useful part. We can watch when tables actually appear and compare. Our measured drop hour matches the hour the restaurant publishes at 33 of the 47 Resy rooms where we hold both figures. On OpenTable the same comparison lands at 1 of 18, because those rooms cannot be checked often enough for a timestamp to mean anything. Resy is the one platform where a measured release time is worth the pixels.
Worse for the midnight theory: across all four platforms in the city the most common hour is 9 AM, not midnight, because OpenTable and SevenRooms rooms pile up there. So the platform average is worth nothing to you. Only your restaurant's hour matters. Setting a midnight alarm for a room that drops at 10 AM is a deeply committed way to achieve nothing.
12:00 AM, 17 restaurants: Jua, Golden Diner, Minetta Tavern, Thai Diner, Umeko, 7 Adams, Penny Roma.
10:00 AM, 14 restaurants: Carbone, Torrisi, Lilia, Via Carota, Cote, Laser Wolf, Izakaya Rintaro.
9:00 AM, nine restaurants: 4 Charles Prime Rib, Monkey Bar, Claud, Theodora, Au Cheval, L'Artusi.
12:00 PM, five restaurants: Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, Ito, Dame, Bridges.
The tails: 7 AM at Le Bernardin and The Four Horsemen, 8 AM at I Cavallini, 11 AM at Bungalow, 10 PM at Liholiho Yacht Club.
"Thirty days" is the received wisdom, and it covers under a quarter of the rooms. Of the 50 Resy restaurants whose window we have confirmed, 12 open 30 days out, eight open 14, seven open 21 and six open 28. The range runs from six days at Bistrot Ha to 60 at Gary Danko.
This matters more than it sounds, because an empty calendar and a sold-out calendar look identical. A room that only opens 14 days ahead shows you a wall of nothing when you plan a month out, and the obvious conclusion is that you are too late. You are not too late. The night has not been invented yet.
Nobody publishes a reason for the number they picked, and the numbers do not track prestige in any way you could predict. Gary Danko reaches 60 days out. Bistrot Ha reaches six. Both are hard to get into. The window is an operational decision about how far ahead a kitchen wants to be committed, not a difficulty rating, so reading it as one will mislead you every time.
The hour and the window only work as a pair. Knowing Monkey Bar drops at 9 AM does nothing for you if you are staring 30 days out at a calendar that only reaches 21.
At the genuinely hard rooms they do not disappear. They were never available to you in the first place. Sixteen of the 67 Resy restaurants we track have never once shown us a bookable two-top, on any date, on any day we looked.
Carbone is the instructive one. Everyone knows it is hard. Fewer people know the shape of it: across 588,600 checks it showed a two-top on 0% of days, and of every open slot we have ever logged there, not one has fallen between 7 and 8:30 PM. Your immaculate 10 AM alarm is competing for an 11:30 PM table.
4 Charles Prime Rib is flatter still: nothing at either size, across 645,420 checks. Via Carota opens on roughly a tenth of days and 96% of that is before 6 PM. These rooms are not testing your reflexes. They are quietly telling you that the seat you want is not in the release.
One genuinely useful move: check the four-top. It is easier than the two-top at 31 of the restaurants we measure and harder at 26, which feels like it should not be true and is simply how floor plans work. Cote goes from 70% of days open at two down to 93% at four. Lilia runs the other way entirely.
Preparation wins this, not reflexes. The booking itself takes about four seconds. The preparation takes ten minutes and can be done the night before, which is fortunate, because at 10 AM sharp you will not be thinking clearly.
The order below matters. Everything above the last step is about being ready for the drop. The last step is what to do when the drop was never going to work, which at a room like Carbone or 4 Charles is most of the time.
Get the restaurant's own hour and window. Resy sets no universal time, and the two facts are independent of each other.
Save a card in the account beforehand. Checkout is a stupid place to lose a table.
Decide your date, size and acceptable times before the release, not during it. You will not negotiate with yourself successfully at 9:59.
Be on the page at the stated minute. At a room that opens on 6% of days, a minute is the entire difference.
Try the four-top as well as the two-top. It is a per-room question with a published answer.
If the release passes with nothing, stop hunting the release. Start watching for returns, which is where most reachable tables at hard rooms actually come from.
Turn it on. It is free and there is no argument against it. You pick one restaurant, one date and one party size, and Resy tells you if something matching appears. For a single fixed plan it is exactly the right tool.
Its limits are structural rather than failings. It covers Resy only, which is 67 of the 284 rooms we watch and, in San Francisco, just 13 of 62. And it watches one date at one party size.
It is also worth knowing what Notify is not. It is not a queue and it is not a hold. Being notified is not being given anything; you are told at the same moment as everyone else who asked, and you still have to open the app and win the table like anybody else. Treat it as a tap on the shoulder rather than a reservation.
That second limit costs more than it looks. If a room opens on roughly one day in twenty, watching a single date is one roll of that dice. Watching the four nights you would genuinely accept is a completely different bet on the same trip, and Notify has no way to express it.
Cancellations, overwhelmingly, which everyone half knows and almost nobody plans around. The scheduled drop is one moment in the day. Everything else is somebody else's plans falling apart.
The scale of it is the surprise. Across the 64 Resy rooms where we hold release data we have logged 4,366 separate openings, and no restaurant released on more than 22 distinct days. Umeko produced 302 of them. Carbone 300. At Carbone that is roughly thirteen separate moments a day when something became bookable, exactly one of which could have been the 10 AM release.
Returns arrive whenever they arrive: a forfeited deposit, a party that shrank, a couple that stopped being a couple, a Thursday that stopped making sense on Wednesday. Nobody sets an alarm for 4:12 PM on a Tuesday three weeks out. That is the whole honest argument for having something watch on your behalf.
There is a rhythm to them, too, even if there is no schedule. Tables come back heaviest in the day or two before the booking, when deposits get written off and plans collapse for good, and again in the quiet hours when somebody finally admits they are not going. A room that has never once opened at the release will still hand out a Tuesday at short notice, which is why "impossible" restaurants are usually only impossible on the drop.
SnagRes watches all four platforms and texts you the moment a room you starred opens. It never books. You finish the reservation yourself, in Resy, under your own name.
Faster sometimes. Worth it, no, and not for moral reasons. A bot books using your Resy login, which parks your account in front of both the restaurant's enforcement and the platform's.
A resale service sells you a table booked in someone else's name, which is precisely the practice New York's 2024 reservation law was written to end. TableSwap charges $75 per reservation. That is seventy five dollars to walk in and answer to a stranger's name at the host stand.
We should be as blunt about our own limit, which is coverage. We watch 284 restaurants. Table Alert advertises 62,198. If your room is not one of ours, we are no use to you at all. What 284 buys instead is actually knowing each one: that Monkey Bar left a two-top open on 50% of 550,180 checks and 95% of what it opens is before 6 PM. Nobody watching 62,198 restaurants can tell you that about a single one of them.
Resy releases tables at an hour and a distance each restaurant sets itself. The confirmed drop times for 56 Resy rooms, why the hardest ones stay closed, and whether Notify helps.
How Resy works, the confirmed release hours and windows for the Resy restaurants we track, why the hardest rooms stay closed, whether Resy Notify helps, and where last-minute tables come from.
Keep reading: When NYC restaurants release tables · When SF restaurants release tables · Every confirmed release time we hold · What the Resy and Tock merger changes · Resy vs OpenTable vs Tock vs SevenRooms · A Resy Notify alternative · How far in advance can you book? · How we measure all of this
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.