Last updated . Source: SnagRes availability record, 61,530,416 checks across 284 restaurants through 19 October 2026. How we measure. Open dataset.
A Resy drop is the moment a restaurant releases a new batch of reservations on Resy. Some drop on a fixed schedule, such as the next month at a set hour on a particular day, while others roll one new date onto the calendar each morning. Of the 88 tracked restaurants whose release time and window we have confirmed, 9 AM, 10 AM, midnight and noon together account for 80.
Prime time means the most sought-after dining hours, which we define as 7:00 to 8:30 PM. Across the 266 restaurants with slot-level history, prime time made up an average of 27% of the times we saw open, and at 17 of them it has made up none at all. Booking earlier or later, or shifting to an off-peak weeknight, is usually the fastest way into a room whose prime slots never survive.
A cover is a single dining guest, so a reservation for a party of four counts as four covers. Restaurants use the term to measure how many people they serve in a service. It is also why availability is tied to party size rather than to a count of tables.
A rolling release adds one new bookable day to the edge of the calendar each day, so a restaurant booking 30 days out opens a single fresh date every morning. A fixed release opens a larger block at once, such as the whole next month on a set day and time. A fixed release gives you one moment to race for. A rolling one gives you almost none, which is why cancellations matter more at those rooms.
Resy Notify is a Resy feature that lets you join a list for a specific date, time, and party size so Resy can email you if a matching table opens. It does not hold or guarantee anything and it does not put you ahead of other diners, so whoever books the freed seat first still gets it. It also only covers Resy, and the hardest tables are not all on Resy.
A ticketed or prepaid reservation is one you pay for in advance, either as a deposit hold on your card or as full payment like an event ticket. The model is common on Tock and is used mainly by tasting-menu and high-end restaurants to cut no-shows. It always comes with a cancellation policy that sets whether and when the money comes back.
Open rate is the share of a restaurant's visible booking window that held at least one bookable table at the last check, measured for a party of two. A 0% open rate does not mean the restaurant never seats anyone. It means a released table almost never stays open long enough for an ordinary diner to find and book it. 39 of the 284 restaurants we measure sit at 0%.
Often dramatically. Z & Y in San Francisco ran a 0% open rate for a party of two and 77% for a party of four, and Cote in New York ran 0% for two and 93% for four. 10 tracked restaurants sit at 0% for two while showing a four-top at least sometimes. Across all 284 measured rooms, 53 are harder for four, 45 are easier, and 186 are the same, so it is always worth checking both.
A reservation tracker watches a restaurant's availability and tells you when a table opens, typically by text or email. It is most useful at rooms that are almost never openly bookable, where nearly every seat comes from a cancellation at an unpredictable hour. SnagRes is a tracker of this kind, covering 284 restaurants across Resy, OpenTable, Tock, and SevenRooms, and it notifies you rather than booking for you.
No. A bot is automated software that tries to book a table the instant one appears, which most platforms disallow and which can get accounts banned. An alert only tells you that a table has opened and leaves the booking to you. SnagRes is an alert service, so it notifies you and never books on your behalf.
A resale marketplace sells you a booking somebody else made, so the table is transferred and your name is not the one on it. TableSwap publishes a charge of $75 per successful reservation for that service, and it is the model New York's 2024 reservation law was written to stop. An alert never books, holds, or transfers a table, so you reserve in your own name on the restaurant's own platform.
Four platforms take almost every hard reservation in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago: Resy, OpenTable, Tock, and SevenRooms. Which one a restaurant uses is the first thing worth knowing, because it decides where you look, how new tables appear, and whether money changes hands before you sit down. A Resy-only dining room and a Tock ticketed room are not variations on one process. They behave differently enough that the same tactics fail on each.
The platform also predicts how often a room actually has a table, which is something we can measure rather than guess. SnagRes tracks 284 restaurants across four cities and re-checks each one every few minutes, 61,530,416 availability checks so far. Group the 283 rooms with enough measured history by platform and the open rate, meaning the share of the visible booking window holding at least one bookable two-top at the last check, separates by platform. Average open rate, hardest first: SevenRooms 32%, Tock 39%, Resy 58% and OpenTable 65%.
That ordering is not a verdict on the software. It reflects which restaurants chose which platform. The rooms that run their own booking page on SevenRooms tend to be the ones with the least to gain from a marketplace, and the rooms selling prepaid tickets on Tock have already thinned their own demand by asking for money up front. Read the platform as a signal about the restaurant, not about the app.
Resy: an online reservation platform owned by American Express that restaurants use to take bookings through its own website and app. 169 of the restaurants we track book on Resy, more than any other platform, and a large share of them have no phone line or second platform to fall back on.
OpenTable: one of the oldest and largest reservation networks, used by tens of thousands of restaurants worldwide, with a points program for frequent diners. It covers a broader mix of venues than the other three, and the 59 OpenTable rooms we track averaged an open rate of 65%, against 55% across every platform.
Tock: a reservation platform, now also owned by American Express, known for prepaid and ticketed bookings at tasting-menu and high-end restaurants. On Tock a reservation often works like an event ticket, with some or all of the cost paid in advance to hold the seat.
SevenRooms: a reservation and guest-management system restaurants use to run their own booking pages and track regulars. Because it is built for the restaurant rather than as a consumer marketplace, diners usually reach it through a venue's own website instead of one central app, which is part of why its openings go unnoticed.
Resy Notify: a built-in Resy feature that lets you join a list for a specific date, time, and party size so Resy can email you if a matching table opens. It is a request to be told about an opening, not a held reservation, and it only covers restaurants that book on Resy.
Restaurants release reservations in batches, on a schedule they set themselves, and most of them publish that schedule somewhere. We hold a confirmed release rule, both a time and a window, for 88 of the restaurants we track, sourced wherever possible from the restaurant's own booking listing or website. Four clock positions cover 80 of them: 9 AM at 25 restaurants, 10 AM at 23, midnight at 17 and noon at 15. The rest are scattered.
How far ahead a room opens is just as concentrated. Across the 268 restaurants where we have measured the furthest date a new release reached, the median booking window is 29 days. 74 sit at a clean 30 days and 23 at 14 days, so the practical choice for most rooms is a month out or a fortnight out, with 18 rooms opening 10 days ahead or less.
None of that tells you when a table will actually appear, which is a different question. We have logged 21,432 individual release events across 268 rooms, a median of 29 per restaurant. Monkey Bar alone accounts for 483 of them, observed on 57 separate days, with new dates landing 20 days out. A schedule that regular is something you can set an alarm for. Most rooms are not that regular.
Drop or release: the moment a restaurant makes a new batch of reservations available on its booking platform. Many sought-after restaurants drop on a set schedule, and the most in-demand slots can be gone within seconds of one.
Rolling window: a release model that adds one new bookable day to the far edge of the calendar each day, so a restaurant booking 30 days out opens a single fresh date every morning. Resy leans heavily on this, which is why it has fewer catchable moments than its size suggests.
Fixed release: a release model that opens a larger block of dates at a set time, for example loading the whole of next month at 10 AM on a particular day. A fixed release gives you one scheduled moment to race for, which makes it easier to plan around and harder to win.
Release time: the hour of day a restaurant's new dates appear. It is worth confirming against the restaurant's own booking listing rather than trusting a roundup, because the same room is often quoted at two different hours on two different blogs.
Booking window: how far ahead a restaurant lets you book, commonly 30 or 14 days. A short window is not necessarily a hard one, but it does mean the calendar you are watching is small, so a single cancellation moves a larger share of it.
Prime time: the most in-demand dining hours, which we define as 7:00 to 8:30 PM. Across the 266 rooms with slot-level history, prime time accounted for an average of 27% of the times we saw open, and at 17 of them it has accounted for none at all. Torrisi's most frequently open slot is 12:15 PM. Monkey Bar's is 7:00 AM.
Table hold: a reservation a restaurant keeps in reserve rather than releasing publicly, often for walk-ins, regulars, or last-minute requests. Held tables are not listed online, so the availability any tracker can see, ours included, is the public book rather than every seat in the room.
Once you are actually booking, restaurants and reservation systems use a shared vocabulary for guests, tables, and timing. These are the words that turn up in a booking flow, a confirmation email, or a conversation with a host, and most of them exist because a restaurant thinks in seats and hours rather than in reservations.
Party size is the one worth dwelling on, because it changes the answer more than almost anything else you control. Z & Y, in San Francisco's Chinatown, had an open rate of 0% for a two-top and 77% for a four-top. Cote, in the Flatiron, ran 0% for two and 93% for four. 10 of the restaurants we track sit at 0% for a party of two while showing a four-top at least some of the time: Carbone, Cote, Enclos, Feld, House of Prime Rib, I Sodi, Somni, Theodora, Z & Y and n/naka. Across all 284 measured rooms, 53 are harder for four than for two, 45 are easier, and 186 are identical, so the effect is real but it does not run one way.
The practical version of that is simple. If a room shows nothing for two, check four before you conclude it is full, and consider whether one seat at the bar would do instead. The reverse is also true at rooms built around two-tops, where a party of four is asking for a table the dining room barely has.
Cover: one dining guest, so a table booked for four counts as four covers. Restaurants track covers to measure how many diners they serve in a night, and reservation systems fill a set number of covers per seating.
Party size: the number of people in your reservation. Tables are configured for certain sizes, so availability often differs sharply by party size, and a platform may show an opening for two guests and nothing for six on the same night.
Seating: a scheduled window during which a table is booked. Some restaurants run more than one seating per table in an evening, and under a timed-seating model your table is yours for a fixed length, often two hours, before the next party arrives.
Corkage: a per-bottle fee a restaurant charges to open and serve wine you bring yourself. Policies vary widely. Some restaurants cap how many bottles you may bring or waive the fee on certain nights, and others do not allow outside wine at all.
The book: the restaurant's master record of every table and booking for a service. Saying a restaurant opens the book means it is releasing reservations, and a tightly managed book is part of why hard tables stay hard.
Walk-in: a diner who arrives without a reservation and asks for a table. Some restaurants keep seats back, often at the bar, specifically for walk-ins, which is why arriving early or off-peak can work even when the online calendar is empty.
Reservations fall apart constantly, and the whole financial architecture of modern booking is built around that fact. At the hardest restaurants, a reservation falling through is not an edge case in the system. It is the system. 39 of the 284 restaurants we measure had an open rate of 0% for a two-top, meaning that at the moment we last looked, not one date in their visible window was openly bookable. For those rooms the only realistic way in is somebody else's change of plan.
That is why the terms below matter more than they look. A deposit is not a surcharge on dinner, it is a restaurant buying itself protection against an empty seat. A cancellation window is not fine print, it is the line between a released table and a charged card. And a cancellation is not a failure, it is the single most useful thing a diner can do for everyone else watching the same room.
The money side of all this is covered properly in our guide to whether reservations cost money, and the behavior side in our guide to reservation etiquette. Both are worth reading before you book something with a card attached.
No-show: a guest who books a table and then neither arrives nor cancels. No-shows cost restaurants real money, which is why many in-demand rooms now hold a card and charge a fee when nobody appears.
Cancellation: a reservation given back before the meal, which returns that table to availability. At restaurants that are otherwise fully booked, cancellations are where nearly all new openings come from, and they surface at unpredictable hours as plans change.
Cancellation window: the deadline for giving a table back without being charged, commonly somewhere around 24 to 48 hours ahead at restaurants that take a card. Cancel before it closes and a hold is released. Cancel inside it and a late cancellation is usually treated the same as a no-show.
Deposit, prepaid, or ticketed reservation: a booking that requires money in advance, either as a hold on your card or as full payment like an event ticket. Common on Tock, it cuts no-shows and always comes with a stated policy that decides whether the money comes back.
Grace period: the stretch of time a restaurant will hold your table past your reservation time, often around fifteen minutes. It is a courtesy rather than a guarantee, and a phone call buys you far more of it than silence does.
These are the measurement terms we use, and each one has an exact definition, because a vague availability claim is worth nothing. Most writing about hard reservations describes rooms as impossible or notorious. We would rather say what a room actually did, over how many checks, for which party size, at which times of day. This section is the key to reading any number on this site.
The distinction that trips people up most is between a most frequently open slot and a most common seating time. They are close to opposites at a hard restaurant. Carbone's most frequently open slot is 11:30 AM, and Monkey Bar's is 7:00 AM, precisely because 8 PM rarely survives at either. What we can see is the residue of demand, not the shape of the dining room.
Everything below is observed rather than modeled. We do not estimate, interpolate, or borrow another site's figure, and when we have not measured something we leave it out rather than fill it in. That is a narrower claim than covering tens of thousands of restaurants, and it is the only kind of claim worth making about a table you are trying to book tonight.
Availability check: one look at one restaurant's calendar for one party size. The 61,530,416 figure is a count of those checks, not of dates or of restaurants.
Open rate: the share of a restaurant's visible booking window that held at least one bookable table at the last check, measured for a party of two. A 0% open rate does not mean nobody eats there. It means a released table almost never sits open long enough to be found.
Four-top open rate: the same measure for a party of four, reported separately because the two figures routinely disagree. Z & Y ran 0% for two and 77% for four.
Most frequently open slot: the time of day most often left open when we looked. It describes leftover availability, not the restaurant's busiest seating.
Early and late share: the proportion of open times before 6 PM and from 9 PM onward. Via Carota's open times were 96% early. Jeju Noodle Bar's were 39% late. Those are two completely different bookable restaurants hiding behind the same word, hard.
Prime-time share: the proportion of open times falling between 7:00 and 8:30 PM. Lilia has a 63% open rate overall and a 6% prime-time share, which is the gap between getting a table and getting the table you pictured.
Release event: one observed instance of a restaurant adding new bookable dates. We record the hour and how far ahead the new date landed, and we only publish a release time once the sample is large enough to be a pattern.
Never seen open: a weekday that has stayed flat at zero across a large sample, which usually means a closing night rather than a hard one. Calling Sunday the hardest night at a restaurant that shuts on Sundays would be false, so we label it instead.
Easiest and hardest night: the weekdays with the highest and lowest share of checks open, published only when the gap is at least ten points. Le Bernardin runs 95% on Tuesdays against 36% on Saturdays.
Once a restaurant is booked solid, five different kinds of service claim they can get you in, and they are not variations on one idea. A waitlist puts you in a queue. An alert tells you when a seat appears. A bot tries to grab it for you. A resale marketplace sells you a booking someone else made. A minimum-spend concierge sells you access bundled with a bar tab. The differences decide what is allowed, what costs money, and whose name ends up on the table.
The line that matters legally runs between telling and booking. New York's 2024 reservation law was written against services that arrange or resell restaurant bookings without the restaurant's agreement, and it reaches services that offer or arrange reservations. TableSwap, for example, publishes a charge of $75 per successful reservation. A service that never books, never holds, and never transfers a table is outside that entirely, which is a deliberate design choice rather than a lucky accident.
SnagRes sits firmly on the telling side. It watches 284 of the hardest tables in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago across all four platforms and texts or emails you the moment one opens, and then you book it yourself, in your own name, on the restaurant's own platform. We never hold a table, never resell one, and never put a reservation under somebody else's name.
Waitlist: a list you join when no table is available, so the restaurant or platform can offer you a spot if one frees up. Some waitlists are for same-day dining on site, others for future dates.
Notify list: a request to be alerted if a table opens for a date and time you want, offered on Resy as Notify. It reserves nothing, puts you ahead of nobody, and covers only the platform it lives on.
Reservation bot: automated software that tries to book tables the instant they appear. Platforms broadly disallow them, accounts get banned for using them, and they are part of why some slots vanish in seconds.
Reservation tracker or alert: a service that watches availability across platforms and tells you when a table opens, usually by text or email. SnagRes is one of these. It notifies, and you book.
Resale marketplace: a service where one person's reservation is sold to another, so the booking is transferred rather than made. This is the model New York's 2024 law was written to stop, and TableSwap's published rate is $75 per successful reservation.
Minimum-spend concierge: a service that hands you a table in exchange for committing to spend a set amount at the restaurant. The table is real, but the price is a bar tab rather than a fee.
A plain-English glossary of restaurant reservation terms: Resy, OpenTable, Tock, SevenRooms, drops, prime time, covers, notify lists, and more.
Plain-English definitions of the reservation terms worth knowing, from Resy drops and prime time to covers, notify lists, deposits, open rate, and the difference between a reservation bot, an alert, and a resale site.
Keep reading: All reservation guides · The hardest reservations, by the numbers · How to cancel, and what a no-show costs · Do reservations cost money? · Resy vs OpenTable vs Tock vs SevenRooms · How to get a last-minute table
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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 see the hardest tables right now.