Reference · SnagRes guides
There are three release mechanisms that matter, and every reservation you'll ever land at a hard-to-book NYC restaurant comes from one of them.
Most Resy restaurants add one new day of availability every night, keeping the calendar rolling exactly 30 days out. If today is Sunday and a restaurant releases dates 30 days ahead, then at midnight it adds a new Monday four weeks from today.
This is where the "book at midnight 30 days out" folklore comes from. At places with strong demand (Carbone, Lilia, Don Angie, Le Bernardin), the freshly released day sells out within seconds. If you want a Saturday at Carbone four weeks out, you are competing at 12:00:00.001 AM with everyone else. Not a chance without automation.
The rolling window is the highest-volume source of new inventory. It's also the most predictable, which is exactly why it's the hardest to catch by hand.
A smaller number of restaurants operate on a "big drop" model: instead of nightly rolling releases, they open a full week or two of dates once a week. The most common pattern in New York is Tuesday or Wednesday morning between 9 and 11 AM, which is why serious reservation hunters keep those windows blocked out on their calendars.
Weekly-drop restaurants are actually easier to target than nightly ones, because the drop is a scheduled event. If you know your target restaurant drops Tuesday at 10, you can prepare. The difficulty is that everyone else knows too.
The most under-tracked source of great tables is cancellations. Roughly 5-15% of prime tier NYC reservations are canceled within 24 hours of the meal, most within the last 3-4 hours. A canceled Carbone booking at 3:47 PM Saturday goes back into the Resy pool and stays there until someone claims it, which at popular restaurants is measured in seconds to a few minutes.
Cancellations are also unpredictable, which means manual checking is basically impossible. You'd have to refresh Resy every 30 seconds for three hours to catch one. This is where an automated tracker matters most: SnagRes checks every restaurant on your watchlist continuously and pings you as soon as a slot appears.
Best times to grab a spot at a hard restaurant, ranked by hit rate:
Resy release volumes are heavily biased toward two-tops because it's the most common party size. But most restaurants also release four-tops, and some release six-tops. A restaurant that shows Sold Out for two people on a Saturday might have three or four open slots for four people at the exact same time. If you can flex your party size up by one or two seats, availability roughly doubles at most tracked restaurants. Bring a friend.
Skip the calendar juggling
Instead of setting midnight and Tuesday-morning alarms, star up to two restaurants on a free account and we'll email you the second inventory opens up. Plus adds up to 30 restaurants, exact time slots in every alert, and the full 30-day calendar.
These are the tracked restaurants where a live alert is the difference between getting a table and refreshing Resy at 9 AM.
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How to get a reservation at any NYC restaurant
How Resy release windows work and when the hardest NYC restaurants drop new dates.
Browse all restaurant reservation guides
SnagRes tracks 80 of the hardest tables in New York City. Across them, an average of 39% of the bookable window is open at any given check, and the tightest is I Sodi at 0%. Availability is rechecked continuously.
Of the 64 New York City restaurants with a confirmed drop time, 20 release at 9:00 AM, and the typical booking window is 20 days ahead. Drop times are set per restaurant, not per platform, so two places on the same platform can open hours apart.
Of the 80 tracked in New York City, 54 book on Resy, 11 on SevenRooms, 9 on OpenTable, 6 on Tock. SnagRes watches all four, because following only one leaves most of the list invisible.
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 140 of the hardest tables in New York and San Francisco around the clock and texts you the second one opens. Watching two is free, and no card is needed: watch a table free in New York, or see the hardest tables right now.