Last updated . Source: SnagRes availability record, 66,314,725 checks across 285 restaurants through October 22, 2026. How we measure. Open dataset.
Measured across 66,314,725 availability checks, 34 of the 285 restaurants in this study, in New York and San Francisco, showed an open rate of 0 percent for a party of two. That is 18 percent of the list with nothing openly bookable anywhere in its visible window at the last check, so the way in is the release minute or a cancellation, caught by whoever hears first.
Twenty-six of the 142 measured restaurants, or 18 percent, sat at a 0 percent open rate for a party of two. In New York, 22 of the 80 tracked rooms are at 0 percent; in San Francisco, only 4 of the 62 are. That group includes Torrisi, The Polo Bar, Semma, 4 Charles Prime Rib, and Monkey Bar in New York, and Z & Y in San Francisco.
New York is meaningfully harder. New York restaurants averaged a 39 percent open rate, with 22 of 80 at 0 percent, while San Francisco restaurants averaged 62 percent, with only 4 of 62 at 0 percent. A typical San Francisco room on the list is open on close to two thirds of the dates in its window.
Chinese and Vietnamese are tied as the hardest cuisines on the tracked list, both averaging a 20 percent open rate, followed by Indian at 22 percent. Italian sits at 37 percent, American at 47 percent, French and Korean both at 50 percent, Japanese at 60 percent, and Seafood at 75 percent, making Seafood the most bookable category we track. Sample sizes range from 3 restaurants to 39, and each figure names its own.
Nolita is the hardest, averaging a 2 percent open rate across 3 tracked restaurants, followed by Midtown East at 13 percent and the West Village at 17 percent. In San Francisco, Chinatown averages 33 percent and Jackson Square 34 percent, and nothing in the city comes close to Nolita.
OpenTable, narrowly. Grouped by platform, the 142 measured restaurants averaged 63 percent open on OpenTable across 34 rooms, 61 percent on Tock across 22, 44 percent on Resy across 67, and 28 percent on SevenRooms across 19. Resy carries the most never-open rooms, 16 of its 67, against just 1 of the 22 on Tock.
Release times are far more concentrated than they look. Of the 98 tracked restaurants with a confirmed release time, 26 release at 10 AM, 24 at 9 AM, 24 at midnight, and 14 at noon, so three clock positions account for 74 of the 98. Booking windows cluster too: of 136 measured rooms, 53 release 30 days ahead and 17 release 14 days ahead.
Often dramatically. Z & Y in San Francisco showed a 0 percent open rate for a party of two and 80 percent for a party of four, and Cote in New York ran 70 percent for two and 100 percent for four. Ten tracked restaurants sit at 0 percent for two while showing a four-top at least sometimes. Across all 285 rooms, 26 are harder for four, 31 are easier, and 85 are the same.
Because prime time is the first thing to go and the slowest to come back. Prime time, meaning 7:00 to 8:30 PM, made up an average of just 26 percent of the open times we recorded across 132 restaurants, and at 14 of them it made up none at all. Cote has a 70 percent open rate and a 0 percent prime-time share, and Carbone, Torrisi, Via Carota, and Monkey Bar are all in the same group.
Open rate is the share of a restaurant's visible booking window that held at least one bookable table at the last check, measured for a party of two. A 0 percent score does not mean a restaurant never seats anyone. It means a released table rarely stays open long enough to find by refreshing, so the way in is the release minute or a cancellation, and an alert tells you first.
SnagRes re-checks 285 restaurants every few minutes, and this study covers 66,314,725 availability checks. Release times are confirmed against each restaurant's own booking listing wherever one states a time, and anything we have not measured is left out rather than estimated. SnagRes alerts you the moment a table opens, by text or email. It does not book for you and never holds a table under another name.
This study sits alongside the rest of our reporting. Read how we measure reservation availability , check any term against the reservation glossary , compare Resy, OpenTable, Tock, and SevenRooms side by side, see the hardest tables right now , read what a deposit or prepaid ticket actually commits you to , and read why reservations are so hard to get .
Twenty-six of the 285 restaurants in this study, 18 percent of the list, showed an open rate of 0 percent for a party of two. That means nothing anywhere in their visible booking window was openly bookable at the moment we last checked. For those rooms the way in is the release minute or somebody else's cancellation, and both are catchable if you hear first.
SnagRes tracks 285 restaurants across New York City and San Francisco, 66,314,725 availability checks so far, and re-checks each one every few minutes. Open rate here is the share of a restaurant's visible booking window that held at least one bookable table at the last check, measured for a party of two. A 0 percent score does not mean a restaurant never seats anyone. It means a released table rarely sits open long enough to find by refreshing, so the people who get in are there at the release time or get an alert.
The 26 rooms at 0 percent include Torrisi, The Polo Bar, Tatiana by Kwame Onwuachi, Semma, The Four Horsemen, 4 Charles Prime Rib, The Corner Store, I Sodi, Don Angie, Monkey Bar, and Red Hook Tavern in New York, alongside House of Prime Rib, Z & Y, and Jules in San Francisco. New York carries almost all of them: 22 of its 80 tracked rooms against 4 of San Francisco's 62.
Depth matters as much as breadth here. Torrisi has been checked 659,302 times and Monkey Bar 75,869, which is what it takes to say something firm about a single dining room rather than something vague about a city. This study covers 285 restaurants and no more. That is the trade: a much shorter list, measured properly.
New York is meaningfully harder. Across the tracked list, New York restaurants averaged a 39 percent open rate and 22 of the 80 sit at 0 percent, while San Francisco restaurants averaged 62 percent and only 4 of the 62 sit at 0 percent. A typical San Francisco room on this list is open on close to two thirds of the dates in its window. A typical New York room is open on well under half.
The gap is not only about demand. It is about platform mix. New York skews heavily to Resy, and Resy mostly uses a rolling daily window rather than a fixed calendar drop, which means a restaurant trickles out one new date at a time instead of loading a month at once. San Francisco's list leans harder on OpenTable and Tock, both of which put more dates on the calendar at once.
The practical consequence is that the two cities reward different behavior. In San Francisco, a plan made a month ahead usually works. In New York, most of the openings a normal diner can actually catch come from cancellations at unpredictable hours, because there is no batch release to race for in the first place.
Ranked by average open rate, where a lower number means a harder table, Chinese and Vietnamese are tied as the hardest cuisines on the tracked list, both averaging 20 percent. Indian follows at 22 percent. Those three sit in a class of their own, open on roughly a fifth of the dates in their windows, while the most bookable categories run three to four times higher.
Sample sizes differ, and they are worth reading alongside the averages. Chinese covers 4 restaurants and Vietnamese 3, so a single room moves the number, whereas American covers 39 and Italian 18. The figures below name the count for that reason.
The Indian result is the one that has moved most. Semma, Bungalow, and The Ambassadors Clubhouse all sit at 0 percent, which drags a seven-restaurant category down hard, and Adda is next at 13 percent. What began as a small handful of rooms is now the most consistently difficult cuisine to book in New York.
Chinese: 20 percent average open rate across 4 restaurants, tied for the hardest cuisine we track.
Vietnamese: 20 percent across 3 restaurants, including Bistrot Ha and Ha's Snack Bar at 0 percent.
Indian: 22 percent across 7 restaurants, 3 of which sit at 0 percent.
Italian: 37 percent across 18 restaurants, the tier that includes Carbone, Torrisi, and I Sodi.
American: 47 percent across 39 restaurants, the largest category and the one with the widest internal spread.
French: 50 percent across 11 restaurants. Korean is level with it at 50 percent across 7.
Japanese: 60 percent across 16 restaurants, 10 in New York and 6 in San Francisco.
Seafood: 75 percent across 5 restaurants, the most bookable category on the list.
The same ranking by neighborhood shows how tightly the hardest tables cluster. Nolita, home to Torrisi and Oriana, averaged a 2 percent open rate across 3 tracked rooms, the single hardest neighborhood on the list. Midtown East follows at 13 percent, with Monkey Bar and The Polo Bar both at 0 percent and COTE 550 carrying the average on its own.
The West Village is the most instructive entry, because it is the largest hard neighborhood rather than the tightest. Eleven tracked rooms average 17 percent, and 5 of them sit at 0 percent, including 4 Charles Prime Rib, Semma, Don Angie, and I Sodi. A neighborhood can be simultaneously the densest concentration of impossible tables and a place where a table is findable, depending entirely on which door you try.
San Francisco's hardest neighborhoods are harder than its citywide average but easier than New York's worst. Chinatown averages 33 percent across 4 rooms and Jackson Square 34 percent across 4. Nothing in San Francisco comes close to Nolita.
Nolita: 2 percent average open rate across 3 restaurants, the hardest neighborhood we track.
Midtown East: 13 percent across 3 restaurants, 2 of them at 0 percent.
West Village: 17 percent across 11 restaurants, 5 of them at 0 percent.
Chinatown: 33 percent across 4 restaurants, 3 in San Francisco and 1 in New York.
Jackson Square, San Francisco: 34 percent across 4 restaurants, including Quince and Cotogna.
East Village: 35 percent across 11 restaurants, a large category with 2 rooms at 0 percent.
Lower East Side: 40 percent across 8 restaurants, 3 of them at 0 percent.
Mission, San Francisco: 65 percent across 13 restaurants, with none at 0 percent.
More than the restaurant's reputation does. Grouped by platform, the 142 measured restaurants separate cleanly: SevenRooms rooms averaged a 28 percent open rate across 19 restaurants, Resy 44 percent across 67, Tock 61 percent across 22, and OpenTable 63 percent across 34. The count of never-open rooms follows the same order, with 16 of the 67 Resy rooms at 0 percent against 1 of the 22 on Tock.
That ordering says less about the software than about who chose it. Restaurants running their own booking page on SevenRooms tend to be the ones with the least to gain from a marketplace. Rooms selling prepaid tickets on Tock have already thinned speculative demand by asking for money before dinner, which is why the platform people assume is the most exclusive is measurably the second most open.
Release timing is the other half of the platform story, and it is far more concentrated than it looks. We keep a release schedule on file for 120 of the tracked restaurants, sourced wherever possible from the restaurant's own booking listing or website. 98 of those state a specific time, and 74 of the 98 fall on just three clock positions: 10 AM at 26 restaurants, 9 AM at 24, and midnight at 24. Noon accounts for another 14.
How far ahead is similarly clustered. Across the 136 restaurants where we have measured the furthest date a new release reached, the median booking window is 29 days, with 53 rooms at a clean 30 days and 17 at 14 days. We have logged 7,048 individual release events across those rooms, a median of 24 each, which is the sample behind every release time we publish.
SevenRooms: 28 percent average open rate across 19 restaurants, 3 at 0 percent.
Resy: 44 percent across 67 restaurants, 16 at 0 percent. The largest platform on our list and the hardest.
Tock: 61 percent across 22 restaurants, only 1 at 0 percent, and the platform where prepaid tickets are most common.
OpenTable: 63 percent across 34 restaurants, 6 at 0 percent, and the broadest mix of venues.
Release times cluster: of 98 confirmed release times, 26 are at 10 AM, 24 at 9 AM, 24 at midnight, and 14 at noon.
Booking windows cluster too: of 136 measured rooms, 53 release 30 days ahead and 17 release 14 days ahead, with a median of 29.
They can matter more than the restaurant you picked. Z & Y, in San Francisco's Chinatown, showed a 0 percent open rate for a party of two and 80 percent for a party of four. Cote, in New York's Flatiron, ran 70 percent for two and 100 percent for four. Ten of the tracked restaurants sit at 0 percent for a two-top while showing a four-top at least some of the time, Monkey Bar, Torrisi, and Semma among them. Across all 285 rooms, 26 are harder for four, 31 are easier, and 85 are identical.
Time of day is the finding most likely to change what you do tonight. We record which times were left open when we looked, and prime time, meaning 7:00 to 8:30 PM, accounted for an average of just 26 percent of them across the 132 rooms with enough slot-level history. At 14 of those restaurants it accounted for none at all, and that group includes rooms nobody would call unbookable: Cote has a 70 percent open rate and a 0 percent prime-time share, and Carbone, Via Carota, Torrisi, I Sodi, and Monkey Bar are all on the same list.
What is left over splits into two completely different restaurants hiding behind the same word, hard. At Monkey Bar 95 percent of the open times were before 6 PM, and its most frequently open slot is 11:45 AM, which makes it a lunch reservation in practice. At House of Prime Rib 98 percent were 9 PM or later, and Four Kings ran 97 percent late. Carbone's most frequently open slot is 11:30 PM and Torrisi's is 10:45 PM, precisely because 8 PM never survives at either.
Weekday matters too, and by a wide margin. At the 79 restaurants where we can measure a real weekday split, the gap between the easiest and hardest night averages 29 percentage points. Saturday is the hardest night at 20 of them, more than any other day, while Thursday is easiest at 23 and Wednesday at 20. Lilia is open on 95 percent of Wednesdays and 22 percent of Saturdays. One more caution: 74 tracked restaurants have at least one weekday we have never seen open, and Monday accounts for 50 of those. That is usually a closing night, not a hard one.
Party of four: 26 tracked rooms are harder for four than for two, 31 are easier, and 85 are the same. Always check both.
Prime time, 7:00 to 8:30 PM: an average 26 percent share of open times across 132 rooms, and a 0 percent share at 14 of them.
Early rooms: Monkey Bar 95 percent of open times before 6 PM, Via Carota 96 percent, Thai Diner 97 percent, I Sodi 100 percent.
Late rooms: House of Prime Rib 98 percent of open times at 9 PM or later, Four Kings 97 percent, Jeju Noodle Bar 90 percent.
Weekday swing: 29 percentage points on average across 79 rooms, with Saturday the hardest night at 20 of them.
Dark nights, not hard ones: 74 rooms have a weekday we have never seen open, Monday at 50 of them and Sunday at 40.
Put the patterns together and one conclusion falls out. New York is the harder city, New York skews to Resy, and Resy mostly releases on a rolling daily window rather than in batches. A rolling window gives a diner almost no scheduled moment to race for, so the openings a real person actually catches in New York are overwhelmingly cancellations, freed at unpredictable hours as plans change in the final days before a booking.
That is a different problem from being early. A batch release rewards an alarm clock. A cancellation rewards being told, because nobody refreshes a restaurant every few minutes for two straight days, and the seat is gone in the time it takes to notice. It is the same reason the 26 rooms at 0 percent are not hopeless: they are producing openings constantly, just never on a schedule anyone can plan around.
We publish this study because we are the party that actually measures reservation availability at this scale, and because almost nothing written about hard restaurants contains a number you can check. Release times here are confirmed against each restaurant's own booking listing wherever one states a time, availability is observed every few minutes rather than sampled once a day, and any figure we have not measured is left out rather than estimated. The list is 285 restaurants, which is far smaller than the tens of thousands other services advertise, and that is exactly why these numbers exist.
SnagRes alerts you the moment a table opens, by text or email. It does not book for you, it never holds a table, and it never puts a reservation under someone else's name.
Keep reading: The hardest tables right now · Open rate and prime time, defined · Resy vs OpenTable vs Tock vs SevenRooms · How we measure this