Last updated . Source: SnagRes availability record, 61,530,416 checks across 284 restaurants through 19 October 2026. How we measure. Open dataset.
It varies far more than the standard advice suggests. Across the 64 New York restaurants whose window we have on record, windows run from 6 days to 45, and 14 days is the most common at 18 rooms, ahead of 30 days at 13. Jeju Noodle Bar opens around 44 days ahead and Golden Steer Steakhouse NYC 45, while Don Angie, Dhamaka and Naks open at 7 and Bistrot Ha at about 6. Check each restaurant rather than planning to one number.
Only the restaurants whose release window falls before your trip and which do not otherwise show availability. That is a short list, usually two or three. Of the 80 New York rooms we score, 30 were open for two on more than half their dates and five on every date we checked, including Per Se, Essex and César, so those can be booked from your hotel once you arrive.
9:00 AM New York time is the most common, at 20 of the 64 rooms whose drop hour we have on record, with midnight and 10:00 AM tied at 16 each and noon at 6. Bungalow releases at 11:00 AM, Ha’s Snack Bar at noon, The Four Horsemen at 7:00 AM and I Cavallini at 8:00 AM. Convert into your own timezone before planning to be awake for it.
Early or late, if the restaurant is a hard one. Monkey Bar puts 100% of its logged openings before 6 PM and its most common slot is 11:45 AM. Torrisi puts 78% at 9 PM or later. Twelve of the 80 New York rooms we score have never logged an opening between 7:00 and 8:30 PM, so insisting on prime time at those rooms is asking for the one thing they never release.
Often, yes. Twenty-one of the New York restaurants we score are more available at four than at two. Monkey Bar showed a bookable four-top on 47% of dates and a two-top on 50%. Torrisi and Semma both read 0% for two and 0% for four. Fifteen rooms run the other way, so check rather than assume.
Cancellations, which are frequent and arrive at no predictable hour. They are taken within minutes, so catching one is a matter of something watching continuously rather than checking often. SnagRes sends an alert when one appears and never books, holds or resells the table itself. It is not a plan you can build a trip on, but it regularly produces a table.
Booking windows at the hardest New York restaurants run from 6 days to 45, so a single thirty-day rule puts you weeks early at some rooms and weeks late at others. It is the advice in every trip guide and it fails in both directions.
Seventy of the New York restaurants we track have a release rule on our record, and 64 of them publish a window length. The most common window is not 30 days. It is 14, at 18 of those 64 rooms, ahead of 30 days at 13 and 21 days at 8. Short windows are commoner than long ones, which is the opposite of what the standard advice assumes.
The named cases make the spread concrete. Jeju Noodle Bar opens dates around 44 days out and Golden Steer Steakhouse NYC at 45. 4 Charles Prime Rib and Monkey Bar both say 21 days on their own Resy listings. Bungalow and Ha's Snack Bar sit at 20. Don Angie, Dhamaka and Naks open 7 days ahead, and Bistrot Ha around 6.
So a visitor who does all their booking thirty days before the trip is more than three weeks too early for Don Angie and two weeks too late for Jeju Noodle Bar. What works is sorting your list by window and setting two or three alarms rather than one.
Work backwards from your first dinner rather than forwards from today, because every window is measured from the date you want, not from the day you book.
Six to seven weeks out is when the longest windows open. If a restaurant releases 44 or 45 days ahead, that date arrives before most people have thought about dinner at all, and it passes quietly. Two rooms on our list behave this way, and both are gettable for exactly that reason.
Two weeks out is the single most valuable alarm, and this is where the old version of this page was wrong. The largest cluster is the 14-day window, not the 21-day one. Twenty-one days is real and worth an alarm of its own, but if you only set one, set it a fortnight before the date.
Inside a week is not too late, and this surprises people. Don Angie, Dhamaka and Naks at 7 days and Bistrot Ha at around 6 are still ahead of you when you land. Meanwhile the genuinely available restaurants, which is most of them, can be booked from your hotel on the day you arrive.
6 to 7 weeks: the longest windows, 44 to 45 days ahead. Jeju Noodle Bar and Golden Steer Steakhouse NYC.
3 weeks: the 20 and 21-day rooms. 4 Charles Prime Rib, Monkey Bar, Bungalow, Ha's Snack Bar.
2 weeks: the biggest cluster of all, 18 of the 64 confirmed windows. Set this alarm first.
1 week: the short-window rooms at 6 and 7 days. Don Angie, Dhamaka, Naks, Bistrot Ha.
On the day: everything in the open tier, which is most of the city.
Every release time is New York time, and the hours are not uniformly civilised. Across the 64 New York rooms whose drop hour we have on record, 9 AM is the most common at 20 of them, with midnight and 10 AM tied at 16 each and noon accounting for 6.
4 Charles Prime Rib, Monkey Bar, Don Angie, Dhamaka, Naks and Oriana all release at 9:00 AM. Carbone, Torrisi, I Sodi and Via Carota go at 10:00 AM. Bungalow goes at 11:00 AM and Ha's Snack Bar at noon. Jeju Noodle Bar, Bistrot Ha and Wild Cherry release at midnight. The Four Horsemen drops at 7:00 AM and I Cavallini at 8:00 AM, which are the two hours most likely to catch a visitor out.
Do the arithmetic once, before the trip. With both cities on summer time, a 9:00 AM New York drop is 2:00 PM in London and 6:00 AM in Los Angeles. A midnight drop is 5:00 AM in London and 9:00 PM the previous evening on the West Coast. A 7:00 AM drop is noon in London and 4:00 AM in California.
If you are travelling from Europe or Asia, at least one restaurant on your list will release while you are asleep. It is worth knowing which one before rather than after, and the release-times table lists every hour and window we have confirmed.
Most of the anxiety a visitor arrives with is aimed at the wrong restaurants. Of the 80 New York rooms we score, 30 opened a table for two on more than half the dates in their window at the last reading, and five were open on every single date we checked.
Per Se, Essex, Shinzo Omakase, Sushi Hayashi Williamsburg and César all read 100%. Cecchi's, Casa Mono and Golden Steer Steakhouse NYC read 97%. Le Bernardin, which has a reputation for being unobtainable, read 61% for two and 74% for four. None of those needs to be booked from another continent six weeks out.
So the pre-flight work is not "book New York". It is "book the two or three rooms that will not be there when I land", which for almost every trip is a genuinely short list. Everything else is a decision you can make over coffee on the first morning.
The list worth the alarms is the one on our hardest-reservations page: 22 New York rooms were fully booked for two across their window, and those are the ones where being early, and hearing first about a returned table, is the difference between eating there and not.
This is the highest-leverage change a visitor can make, and it costs nothing. At the hardest New York rooms, the tables that survive are early or late, and we can say which by the clock.
Monkey Bar's most common open slot is 11:45 AM, and 95% of the 643,567 openings we have logged there were before 6 PM. I Sodi has never logged one after 6 PM across 11,180 openings, with 4:30 PM the most common. Via Carota's most common is 3:00 PM, Thai Diner's is 8:30 AM. Twelve of the 80 rooms we score in New York have never logged a single opening between 7:00 and 8:30 PM.
Other rooms give away the other end of the evening. Torrisi puts 78% of its openings at 9 PM or later, with 10:45 PM the most common. Jeju Noodle Bar runs 39% late, Ha's Snack Bar 81%, Bistrot Ha 62%. If your trip can absorb a 9:45 PM table, several rooms that look shut are not.
A traveller who insists on 7:30 PM at a 0% restaurant is asking for the one thing that room never releases. A traveller who asks for 5:30 PM or 10:00 PM is eating in the same room, off the same menu, on a date they could actually get.
Twenty-one of the New York restaurants we score are more available for four people than for two, and at the hardest rooms the gap is the whole story.
Monkey Bar showed a bookable two-top on 50% of dates and a four-top on 47%. Torrisi and Semma both read 0% for two and 0% for four. I Cavallini goes from 3% to 7%. Cote reads 0% for two and 93% for four, which means a group of four could have booked it on every date we checked.
If you are travelling with another couple, book under the four-top. If you are a couple travelling alone, it is worth knowing that the four-top number is the one behind most of the "we got in, why can't you" stories.
Fifteen rooms run the other way and are easier for two, so it is not a universal rule. It is a variable to check per restaurant rather than an assumption to carry.
If your dates fall outside a restaurant's release window, the drop is not available to you and the only remaining route is a cancellation.
Cancellations are frequent and they are real tables. They arrive when a deposit deadline lapses or a plan changes, at every hour of the day, and they are taken within minutes. There is no technique that surfaces them. The only variable is whether something was watching when one appeared.
That is the specific gap SnagRes fills. It re-checks 284 restaurants in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago around the clock across Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms, which adds up to 61,530,416 availability checks so far, and it texts or emails you when a table opens. That is the only way a traveller catches a 3:40 PM Wednesday cancellation without spending the trip on a booking page.
What it will not do is book the table. SnagRes never holds a reservation, never books under another name and never resells one. TableSwap charges $75 per successful reservation, which is the practice New York's 2024 reservation law was written to stop. An alert points at a table that is genuinely free and leaves the booking to you.
Being honest about it: a cancellation is not something to plan a trip around. Book what you can actually get, then treat an alert as the upgrade rather than the plan.
Most of the work is done before you leave, and it takes about twenty minutes.
List the restaurants that actually matter to the trip. Usually it is two or three, not ten.
Look up each one's booking window and release time rather than assuming thirty days. Two weeks is the commonest window we have confirmed, and 9 AM the commonest hour.
Convert those times into your own timezone and set alarms. Midnight and 7 AM New York drops are the ones that catch travellers out.
Confirm the platform for each: Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms are all in use, and 27 of the 84 New York rooms we track are not on Resy at all.
Create the account and save a card before the release, not during it.
Decide the hour you will accept in advance. At a 0% room the answer is usually early or late, and pretending otherwise costs you the booking.
Check whether your party size helps. Twenty-one New York rooms are more open for four than for two.
Decide your fallback for each room in advance, so a missed drop does not become an argument on a street corner.
If San Francisco is on the same trip, treat it as a separate problem: windows there run 30 days as standard, and most of the hardest rooms are not on Resy.
Booking windows at the hardest New York restaurants run from 6 days to 45, and two weeks is commoner than thirty, so "book a month ahead" fails. A measured timeline, with release hours converted for travellers.
Keep reading: Booking New York from out of town · Do you even need a reservation? · When every restaurant releases tables · The hardest NYC rooms, and how to get in · The hardest reservations in San Francisco
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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 last-minute tables in NYC tonight, or see the hardest tables right now.