Last updated . Source: SnagRes availability record, 61,530,416 checks across 284 restaurants through 19 October 2026. How we measure. Open dataset.
Dorsia is a paid membership app that unlocks hard-to-book restaurant tables in exchange for a guaranteed minimum spend. You commit upfront to spending a set amount at the restaurant, prepaid through the app, rather than booking a normal free reservation. It trades money for access, so it is neither a waitlist nor an alert.
Participating restaurants list a minimum spend for each date and time, and you prepay that minimum to reserve the table. The prepaid amount becomes a credit toward your final bill, so it is money you spend on dinner rather than a fee. If your bill runs under the minimum you still owe the minimum, and if it runs over you pay the difference.
Dorsia is worth it when you have a fixed date and a table you cannot get any other way, and when your party would have cleared the minimum anyway. It is a poor fit for a light or small dinner, because you are locked into a spending floor. The premium buys certainty of access, not a discount, so it is worth checking whether the room is actually closed first.
Resy releases ordinary reservations for free on a schedule, so you pay only for what you order, but the best slots disappear in seconds. Dorsia sells guaranteed access to prime tables in exchange for a prepaid minimum spend. Resy is free and competitive, while Dorsia is paid and certain, and only at participating restaurants.
No. A waitlist queues you and hopes a table frees up, and an availability alert notifies you when a free table opens on Resy or OpenTable so you can book it at menu prices. Dorsia is neither. It guarantees the table now in exchange for a prepaid minimum spend.
No. Dorsia works only at restaurants that choose to participate, and many of the hardest tables in New York and San Francisco are not on it at all. To reach those, you have to watch the actual booking platform the restaurant uses, which is why a free availability alert covers ground no single membership can.
Look at what the room releases. Per Se had a bookable two-top on all 30 dates in its window on the day we measured, and Delfina, Nopa, Hinodeya and Horsefeather each had one on all 30 of theirs. Meanwhile 39 of the 284 rooms we measure released no two-top on any date. The first group needs no guarantee and the second is where certainty is genuinely worth paying for.
Neither. There is no minimum spend, no per-reservation fee, and no booking on your behalf. We watch 284 rooms across Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms, measure what each releases, and tell you when a table opens so you can book it yourself at menu prices in your own name.
Of the 118 App Store reviews of Dorsia Members Club we pulled on 16 September 2026, 78 were one or two stars. The complaints that repeat: the same tables were bookable free on Resy or OpenTable, the membership buys the right to pay more for the meal, the app crashes, and support does not answer. More than one reviewer gives the advice we would: set the Resy notification instead.
For the other paid routes to a hard table, see buying a resold reservation and alerts, bots and resale compared, plus where each one stands legally.
The release hours behind these numbers are on the release schedule for each room we watch, every alert service is compared in alert services compared, and you can see what is open right now in New York or San Francisco.
Dorsia is a paid membership reservation app that gives you access to hard-to-book tables in exchange for committing to a guaranteed minimum spend at the restaurant. Instead of booking a normal free table and paying for whatever you happen to order, you reserve a slot by agreeing upfront to spend at least a set amount, which you prepay when you book. In plain terms, Dorsia sells access to scarce tables, and the currency is a spending commitment rather than a simple fee to the app.
That makes Dorsia fundamentally different from a booking platform or an availability alert. It is not a waitlist that queues you, and it is not a notification that tells you when an ordinary table opens up. It is a paid channel that trades money for certainty, and it works only at the restaurants that choose to participate.
The question this page tries to answer is narrower than whether the model is good. It is whether the specific table you want needs a spending floor attached to it, which is a question about the restaurant rather than about the app.
When you open Dorsia, participating restaurants show a minimum spend for a given date and time, and often a higher minimum for the most in-demand slots. You pick a table, agree to the minimum, and prepay it through the app. That prepaid amount then acts as a credit toward your final bill, so the money is not an extra charge stacked on top of dinner. It is dinner you have committed to buying in advance.
Because that spend is guaranteed to the restaurant, the restaurant is willing to hold prime tables for the app that it would otherwise release slowly or keep for regulars. If your actual bill comes in under the minimum, you still owe the minimum, and if it runs over, you simply pay the difference.
The trade is straightforward. You remove the uncertainty of ever landing the table, and in return you accept a floor on what the evening costs. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on how uncertain the table was in the first place, which is the part nobody usually measures.
Here is the check worth running before paying for certainty. We watch 284 of the hardest rooms in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago and have logged 61,530,416 checks of their live booking calendars as of 19 October 2026, plus 465,235,816 recorded open time slots. That record says which celebrated rooms are genuinely closed and which ones are open most nights while carrying a reputation that says otherwise.
Reputation and availability come apart constantly. Per Se, a Tock restaurant most people assume is out of reach, had a bookable two-top on all 30 dates in its window on the day we measured, with 28 percent of its recorded open slots in the 7 to 8:30 PM range. Essex had one on 31 of 31 dates. In San Francisco, Delfina, Nopa, Hinodeya and Horsefeather each had a bookable two-top on all 30 dates in their windows, and between 52 and 60 percent of what came free at those four sat in the prime dinner window.
Then there is the other end of the list, where certainty would be worth real money. 39 of the 284 rooms with a full measurement record had no bookable two-top on any date in their window at all, and 12 rooms logged open slots but never one between 7 and 8:30 PM. For rooms like those, a guaranteed prime table is not a convenience, it is the only version of the evening that exists.
We cannot tell you which restaurants participate in Dorsia, and we do not guess. What we can tell you is what each of the 284 rooms we watch releases on its own, which is the number that decides whether a minimum spend is buying you something you could not otherwise have.
Check the room before the price: a spending floor at a restaurant that opens most nights is a floor on your bill and nothing else.
26 rooms on our list had every two-top taken across their window, which is where an alert matters most. Ten of those did release a four-top, so party size is worth testing before money is.
12 rooms logged open slots but never one between 7 and 8:30 PM, which is the slot a guarantee is usually sold against.
Thirty rooms never let anyone book more than 14 days ahead. No membership can conjure a date the restaurant has not released.
31 rooms are easier to book for four than for two, and 26 are easier for two than for four.
Whether Dorsia is worth it depends on how you value certainty against cost. If you have a fixed date, a special occasion, and a table you cannot otherwise get, a guaranteed prime slot at a restaurant where you were going to spend the minimum anyway can be a fair deal. The spend commitment stings far less when your party would have cleared it on its own.
The honest caveats are real. You are agreeing to a spending floor, so a light dinner or a small party can leave you paying for food and drink you did not actually want. The premium buys access, not a discount, and it exists only at participating restaurants. Many of the very hardest tables are not on Dorsia at all, which means the guarantee covers a slice of the map rather than the whole of it.
The caveat we can measure is the one above: some of the rooms people most expect to need a guarantee do not. Paying a floor for a table that was sitting open is the most common way this goes wrong, and it takes one look at the live calendar to avoid.
Resy and OpenTable release ordinary reservations for free on a schedule, so you pay only for what you order and there is no minimum. The catch is that the best slots vanish within seconds of release, and cancellations surface at random hours you cannot sit and watch. Dorsia answers that scramble by charging for certainty. An availability alert answers it a third way, by watching the normal platforms for you and telling you the instant a free table opens.
SnagRes is that third option. It tracks 284 of the hardest rooms across Resy, OpenTable, Tock, and SevenRooms, re-checks them continuously, and tells you the moment a normal table opens so you can book it at menu prices with no minimum. Browsing live availability is free and needs no account, a free account watches one restaurant, and Plus is $14.99 a month for 30 restaurants, the exact time slots that came free, and a 30-day calendar instead of 14.
Here is the difference in one line. Dorsia guarantees the table but sets a spending floor and covers only participating restaurants, while an alert costs nothing, covers whichever platform the restaurant actually uses, and asks you to act fast when the notification lands.
One thing we never do is book. We hold no booking logins, never place or hold a reservation, and charge nothing per table, which keeps the reservation ordinary and in your own name. That also means the last step is yours, which is a genuine limitation rather than a modest way of describing a feature.
Dorsia trades a guaranteed minimum spend for a guaranteed prime table, and only at restaurants that opt in.
Resy and OpenTable release free reservations on a schedule, so you pay menu prices but must win the drop or catch a cancellation.
An availability alert like SnagRes watches those free platforms and notifies you when a normal table opens, at no cost and with no minimum.
The hardest tables are spread across every platform, and in San Francisco only 13 of the 62 rooms we measure book through Resy, against 25 on OpenTable and 16 on Tock.
We recorded 7,048 separate release events across the tracked rooms in at most 22 days of observation, which is the free supply a membership is charging you to skip.
What Dorsia is, how its minimum-spend model works, and how it compares to free Resy reservations and free availability alerts, as of 2026.
An explainer on Dorsia, the members reservation app that unlocks hard-to-book tables for a guaranteed minimum spend, and how it compares to free Resy reservations and free availability alerts.
Keep reading: Resy vs OpenTable vs Tock vs SevenRooms · Rooms that are open most nights · The hardest NYC reservations · Set a free 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.