Nine in the morning is the most common release hour in New York and midnight is a minority, but the only hour that helps you is the one your restaurant uses. These twelve tracked rooms are the ones where the release moment decides the outcome, because what we measure afterwards is close to nothing. Each row gives the hour the restaurant states, how far ahead its calendar reaches, and what our own checks found.
The full table of confirmed drop times sits on the release schedule page, ranked availability on the hardest tables, and the measurement itself is written up in our methodology. Every restaurant above has its own page with the same figures kept current.
Nine in the morning is the single most common release time among the New York restaurants we track. We hold availability data for 80 New York rooms, have confirmed a release schedule for 70 of them, and 64 of those name an hour. Twenty open their next date at 9 AM. Sixteen open at 10 AM, and sixteen at midnight, which is the time everybody repeats. So the midnight rule is right about a quarter of the time and wrong the rest of it.
The deeper problem with the folklore is that it assumes there is a citywide hour at all. There is not. Resy, OpenTable, Tock and SevenRooms all let the restaurant pick, and restaurants use that freedom: two of ours drop at 7 AM, one at 8 AM, six at noon, and one at three in the afternoon.
The useful question is never when New York restaurants release tables. It is when this restaurant releases tables, which is answerable, because either the room states it or we have watched it happen. The list below is the distribution across every New York schedule we have confirmed.
9:00 AM, 20 restaurants. The most common hour in the city, and the one 4 Charles Prime Rib, Monkey Bar, Semma, Claud and Don Angie all use.
10:00 AM, 16 restaurants, including Carbone, Torrisi, Lilia, Via Carota and Cote.
12:00 AM, 16 restaurants, including Jua, Golden Diner, Minetta Tavern, Thai Diner and Umeko. This is the one the midnight advice is describing, and it is a minority of the city.
12:00 PM, 6 restaurants, including Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, Ito, Dame and Bridges.
The tails: 11:00 AM at two rooms, 7:00 AM at two, 8:00 AM at one, 3:00 PM at one. Small numbers, and exactly where someone setting a midnight alarm loses the table.
Two weeks is the most common booking window in New York, not a month. Of the 60 New York restaurants whose window we have confirmed as a rolling number of days, 15 open 14 days out and only 13 open 30 days out. The rest are spread from six days to forty-five.
That range is the part worth internalising. Bistrot Ha releases six days ahead. Jeju Noodle Bar releases 44, and Golden Steer Steakhouse NYC 45, the two longest confirmed windows we have in the city. Don Angie, Dhamaka and Naks all work on seven days, which means a diner planning a month ahead at Don Angie is staring at a calendar the restaurant has not created yet and reading it as sold out.
The window and the hour are separate facts, and you need both. Knowing that Monkey Bar drops at 9 AM is useless if you are looking 30 days out at a room that only opens 21 days ahead.
7 days out: Don Angie, Dhamaka, Naks. Nothing exists a month ahead, so a month of planning shows an empty calendar that is not really empty.
13 to 15 days out: I Sodi, Buvette, The Corner Store, Semma, ADDA, Claud, L'Artusi, Somssi, Oriana.
20 to 21 days out: 4 Charles Prime Rib, Monkey Bar, Bungalow, Ha's Snack Bar, Au Cheval, Laser Wolf, Chez Fifi, Ito, Dame.
28 to 30 days out: Carbone, Torrisi, Lilia, Via Carota, Theodora, Minetta Tavern, Cote, The Polo Bar, The Four Horsemen.
44 to 45 days out: Jeju Noodle Bar and Golden Steer Steakhouse NYC.
Six of the New York schedules we have confirmed are not daily at all. Those rooms open a block of dates on a fixed calendar date, so checking every morning is wasted effort. There is one morning a month that matters, and on the other twenty-nine or thirty nothing new appears.
Le Bernardin is the clearest case, and the most instructive. It opens the first of the month at 7 AM, and across 681,525 date checks we found a bookable two-top on 61% of days and a four-top on 65%. That sounds easy until you look at which hours survive: 1% of the slots we have ever seen open there fall between 7 and 8:30 PM, and the time most often left open is 10:30 PM. The month opens, the prime tables go, and what is left is late.
A calendar release also punishes the wrong kind of patience. If you miss the first of the month at Per Se, the next opportunity is not tomorrow, it is four weeks away, or a cancellation.
Le Bernardin, first of the month at 7:00 AM. Open on 61% of days for two and 65% for four, but only 1% of open slots are prime time.
Per Se, first of the previous month at 10:00 AM. We recorded 21 openings on 21 separate days, which is the signature of a room that changes once a day at most.
César, first of the month at 12:00 PM. Open on 100% of the days we checked, so the calendar date is the whole difficulty.
Tsukimi, first of the month for the following month, at 3:00 PM. Open on 70% of days checked.
Ramen By Ra, the 1st and the 15th at 9:00 AM. Two mornings a month, and no two-top on any day we checked.
The Ambassadors Clubhouse, roughly two weeks before the first of the month, at midnight.
Across the 76 New York restaurants where we have release data, we have recorded 11,864 separate openings, and no restaurant was observed releasing on more than 22 distinct days. A room that adds one new date each night cannot produce numbers like that.
Umeko accounts for 302 of those openings across 22 days. Carbone 300 across 22. Monkey Bar 273, Via Carota 256, Lilia 221. At Carbone that is roughly thirteen separate moments a day when something became bookable that had not been a minute earlier, and only one of them can be the 10 AM release.
The rest are tables coming back: a deposit written off, a party of four shrinking to two, a Tuesday plan that died on Monday. They arrive at no particular hour, which is the entire reason an alarm clock loses to an alert. You cannot set a reminder for 4:12 PM on a Thursday three weeks from now.
One honest caveat on that count. We record an opening when a date goes from having nothing to having something, so a single event can be one returned table or a handful at once. The count is a floor on activity, not a table-by-table ledger.
Umeko: 302 openings recorded across 22 days, on a midnight release, 29 days out.
Carbone: 300 openings across 22 days, on a 10 AM release, 30 days out.
Monkey Bar: 273 openings across 22 days, on a 9 AM release, 21 days out.
Via Carota: 256 openings across 21 days, on a 10 AM release, 30 days out.
Lilia: 221 openings across 22 days, on a 10 AM release, 28 days out.
At 22 of the 80 New York restaurants we measure, we have never once found a bookable two-top, on any date, on any day we looked. For those rooms, perfect timing on the release is not the missing piece, because the release is not producing a table you can reach.
4 Charles Prime Rib is the flat case: 679,530 date checks, no open two-top and no open four-top, on a stated 9 AM release 21 days out. Torrisi shows 0% for two across 659,302 checks and 0% for four, with 116 openings recorded and not one of its open slots falling between 7 and 8:30 PM. Carbone comes out at 0% for two, 0% for four, and again a prime-time share of zero, with 11:30 PM the time most often left open.
Read that as a planning instruction rather than a verdict. A flawless 10 AM alarm at Carbone is competing for 11:30 PM. If you actually want 8 PM on a Saturday there, the honest answer is that we have not seen it open, and the realistic route is a cancellation on a night you did not originally pick.
The same measurement cuts the other way and is worth saying, because the loudest rooms are not the only rooms. Lilia showed a two-top on 67% of days checked, with Wednesday the easiest night at 87% and Saturday the hardest at 19%. Less hyped does not mean less good, and it usually means bookable.
4 Charles Prime Rib: 0% of 679,530 date checks for two, 0% for four. 9 AM, 21 days out.
Torrisi: 0% for two, 0% for four, across 659,302 checks. 78% of open slots are 9 PM or later.
Monkey Bar: 0% for two, 50% for four, across 569,048 checks. 95% of what opens is before 6 PM, most often 11:45 AM.
Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi: 0% for two and four across 645,599 checks, on a noon release 27 days out.
Via Carota: 10% for two across 639,536 checks, and 96% of its open slots are before 6 PM, most often 3:00 PM.
I Sodi: 0% for two, 3% for four, and every open slot we have logged is before 6 PM.
Flexing up to a four-top is worth trying, but it is not the universal trick it gets sold as. Across the 80 New York restaurants we measure, the four-top open rate is higher than the two-top rate at 21 of them, lower at 15, and identical at 44. Calling it a doubling would be false at three quarters of the city.
Where it works, it works hard. Cote goes from 70% of days open for two to 93% for four. Minetta Tavern goes 55% to 74%, Musaafer 33% to 40%, Chez Fifi 47% to 60%, and Monkey Bar from nothing at all to 20%.
Where it fails, it fails in the direction nobody expects. Penny drops from 43% to 10%, Bong from 63% to 33%, Lilia from 60% to 47%, Forsythia 67% to 53%, Nubeluz 77% to 70%. Small rooms built out of two-tops cannot always make a four, and pushing a party of four at them narrows your odds.
So treat party size as a per-restaurant question with a published answer, not a rule of thumb. Both numbers sit on every restaurant page we run.
Two sources, kept separate on purpose. The first is what the restaurant states about its own release, quoted with a link to where it says it. The second is what we observe by checking availability over and over and recording the moment a date goes from empty to bookable.
On Resy the two mostly agree, which is the strongest thing we can say for the method: our measured modal drop hour matches the hour the restaurant publishes at 33 of the 47 Resy rooms where we have both. On SevenRooms it matches 7 of 13. On OpenTable it matches 1 of 18 and on Tock 1 of 14, because on those platforms we cannot check often enough for the timestamp to be about the restaurant rather than about us. Where the two disagree, this page uses the restaurant's stated time, and says which figure is which.
The coverage limit matters just as much. We watch 285 restaurants in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago. Table Alert advertises 62,198. We cannot tell you anything about a room we do not watch, and that is a real gap. The trade is that nobody watching 62,198 restaurants can tell you that Monkey Bar left a two-top open on 53% of 569,048 checks, or that Carbone's prime-time share is zero.
Last thing, because it changes what this page is for. We never book a table. SnagRes tells you the moment one is there and you book it yourself in the restaurant's own app. Services that book on your behalf or resell a table booked under someone else's name charge per reservation, which is the practice New York's 2024 reservation law was written to stop, and TableSwap publishes a price of $75 per successful reservation. We have nothing to charge per booking, because we never make one.
The confirmed release hour and booking window for 70 New York restaurants, plus what our own availability checks show about when tables actually appear.
Nine in the morning, most often. We have confirmed the release schedule for 70 of the 80 New York restaurants we track, and measured what actually opens at each one. Midnight is a minority, 30 days ahead is the exception, and most of the tables we see appear are not the drop at all.
Keep reading: Every confirmed release time we hold · When SF restaurants release tables · Booking a hard table on Resy · What the Resy and Tock merger changes · How to get a reservation at any NYC restaurant · Full SnagRes FAQ
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SnagRes tracks 84 of the hardest tables in New York City. Across them, an average of 36% of the bookable window is open at any given check. Even the hardest give tables back: Theodora had a table open up on 100% of its dates at some point. Availability is rechecked throughout the day.
Of the 60 New York City restaurants with a confirmed drop time, 18 release at 9:00 AM, and the typical booking window is 21 days ahead. Drop times are set per restaurant, not per platform, so two places on the same platform can open hours apart.
Of the 84 tracked in New York City, 56 book on Resy, 12 on SevenRooms, 9 on OpenTable, 7 on Tock. SnagRes covers each platform represented in this city list.
No. SnagRes tells you the moment a table opens and links you straight to the restaurant's own booking page, where you complete the reservation yourself. It does not hold, auto-book or resell tables.
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.