Tock reservations are often prepaid tickets, paid for when you book. 12 of the 20 Tock restaurants we track with a confirmed rule release a batch of dates at once, and the most common drop time is 10:00 AM. Once a night sells out, it comes back only as a cancellation, and SnagRes texts you the second one appears.
Measured on the 28 Tock restaurants SnagRes watches, across 55,216 availability checks: how hard they are, when they drop, and which hour of the night they actually hand over. None of it is taken from the platform's own documentation.
It knows what 28 specific Tock calendars did, rather than what Tock says they do. As of 19 October 2026 that is 55,216 availability checks on Tock restaurants, 283,795 logged open slots and 32 observed release events. Every number below is a count of something we watched happen.
Tock began as a prepaid ticketing platform for tasting menus and still behaves like one. Many of its rooms sell a ticket rather than take a reservation, which is why a Tock calendar can look wide open while the money is already committed.
That resolution is only possible because the list is short on purpose. Table Alert advertises 62,198 restaurants. We watch 284, continuously, and 28 of them are on Tock. It is a deliberate trade: a list small enough to describe precisely instead of one long enough to impress. If your restaurant is not on it, a broad directory is honestly the better tool.
We have a confirmed release schedule for 20 of the 28. The remaining 8 are left blank rather than guessed at, which is the whole reason the 20 are worth reading.
Tock is the second hardest of the four platforms we watch. Its restaurants showed a bookable table for two on 39% of the dates in their window on average, with a median of 40%, and 7 of the 28 showed nothing at all. Mean open rate across all four: OpenTable 65%, Resy 57%, Tock 39%, SevenRooms 32%.
The spread inside the platform is wider than the gap between platforms, which is the part a single average hides. On Tock the hardest rooms we track are Atomix at 0%, Enclos at 0%, Feld at 0%, Fu Hui Hua at 0%. The easiest are César at 100%, Cafe Zoetrope at 100%, Jungsik at 80%. Those are the same software, the same release mechanics and the same city pair, so the platform is clearly not the thing doing the work.
The honest caveat is geography. Of these 28 restaurants, 7 are in New York, 15 in San Francisco, 2 in Los Angeles and 4 in Chicago, and the cities are not equally hard: the median New York room on our list is bookable on 35% of dates against 65% in San Francisco. Any platform-versus-platform comparison that does not say which city it measured is quoting a coincidence rather than an effect.
What the platform does tell you is which kind of operator chose it, and that is a real signal about how much of its own room a restaurant is managing by hand. It is a prior, not a verdict, and it should never decide where you eat.
They cluster, and the cluster is specific to the platform. Across the 19 Tock restaurants where we have confirmed a release time, 10:00 AM is the single most common moment, covering 47% of them. The drops are not spread evenly through the day and the equivalent hour on the other three platforms is usually somewhere else entirely.
Tock is the one platform where batch releases outnumber rolling ones among the rooms we track. A month opens at once, on a published date, and then nothing changes until the next batch.
That matters because a release you miss by an hour is a release you missed entirely. If you only ever book on one platform, you learn one of these clocks and quietly assume it is universal. The failure this causes is small, avoidable, and extremely annoying: arriving at 9:59 AM for a midnight drop that happened ten hours earlier.
Tock usually wants payment at the moment of booking, sometimes for the full menu. Have the card ready before the batch opens, because a ticketed release clears faster than a reservation one.
This is the part of a platform's behaviour nobody publishes, and it is more useful than the open rate. We record the clock time of every open slot we see, so for the 20 Tock restaurants with enough slot data we can say which part of the evening they tend to hand over. On Tock, 35% of openings fall before 6 PM, 31% land in the 7:00 to 8:30 PM band, and 13% arrive at 9 PM or later.
Ranked against the other three, the order is not the same twice. Prime-time share, richest first: OpenTable 32%, Tock 31%, Resy 25%, SevenRooms 25%. Share arriving at 9 PM or later, richest first: SevenRooms 27%, Resy 22%, OpenTable 22%, Tock 13%. A reader who wants a 7:30 PM table has roughly double the odds on one of these platforms than on another, before picking a date.
Tock rooms release almost nothing late. The seating you can actually get on Tock is early or in the middle of service, and a late table there is close to nonexistent.
The practical use is blunt. Ask the platform's rooms for the hour they actually release, not the hour you had in mind, and a calendar that looked empty often is not. The kitchen is the same at both ends of the night.
Tock has no general waitlist equivalent. Some venues offer a notify list per experience. Either way the limit is the same shape: a platform feature covers that platform and nothing else, so if the table you want sits on one of the other three it does not help you at all. On our list the hardest rooms are spread across all four.
SnagRes watches all four platforms instead, including the SevenRooms pages that live only on a restaurant's own website and never appear in a marketplace at all, and texts or emails you the moment a watched table opens. Then it stops. We never book the table, never hold it, and never resell it. You book it yourself, in your own account, at the restaurant's own price.
That line is load-bearing rather than decorative. TableSwap advertises $25 a month plus roughly $75 for every successful reservation, which attaches a fee to a restaurant seat, and attaching a fee to a restaurant seat is the practice New York's 2024 reservation law was written to stop. An alert costs the restaurant nothing and leaves the booking with you.
See all 20 Tock schedules, alongside the other three platforms.
8 of the 28 Tock restaurants we track do not yet have a confirmed release schedule. 8 do not have enough slot data to name an hour, and are left blank. A modal drop time drawn from a handful of events on a single day is not a schedule, so we hold it back until the sample supports it, and an hour-of-the-night figure built on a few dozen sightings is not a pattern either.
Everything here describes hard-to-book restaurants in four cities, which is not the same as describing Tock as a whole. Tock has restaurants we do not watch and never will, and the ones we do watch were chosen precisely because they are difficult, so this is a biased sample by design and useful for that reason.
The percentages are a point-in-time reading of the current booking window, dated 19 October 2026. The counters are cumulative and only grow, because raw snapshots get pruned after a few days while the counts keep going. Both are always stated with the sample they came from, so you can tell a pattern from a coincidence.
Keep reading: Every measured release schedule · Which platform has the hardest tables · The four platforms compared · Alert services compared · Catching the cancellation instead · How we measure all of this
Across the 19 Tock restaurants SnagRes has confirmed a drop time for, 9 release at 10:00 AM, with a typical window of 30 days ahead. Tock lets each restaurant set its own schedule, so the platform does not have one release time.
Of the 28 Tock restaurants SnagRes tracks, an average of 39% of the booking window is open at any check. The tightest is Enclos, at 0%.
Yes. Star a restaurant and SnagRes emails you when availability appears. A free account watches two restaurants; Plus removes the limit and shows exact slot times. SnagRes alerts you rather than booking for you, so you keep control of which table you take.
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.