Measured across 8.04 million availability checks as of September 2026, 25 of the 140 hardest-to-book restaurants SnagRes tracks in New York and San Francisco showed a bookable table on 0 percent of dates. That is 18 percent of the list that is effectively never openly bookable, so the only realistic way in is a cancellation.
Forty-one of the 140 tracked restaurants, or 29 percent, sat at 0 percent open across the study. In New York, 30 of the 80 tracked rooms are at 0 percent; in San Francisco, 11 of the 60 are. That group includes names like Carbone, Torrisi, and Benu.
New York is meaningfully harder. New York restaurants averaged 34 percent of dates open, with 30 of 80 at 0 percent, while San Francisco restaurants averaged 56 percent open, with only 11 of 60 at 0 percent. A typical San Francisco room on the list is open on more than half of its dates.
Chinese is the hardest cuisine on the tracked list, open on just 12 percent of checked dates, followed by Indian at 15 percent and Vietnamese at 24 percent. Mediterranean sits at 27 percent, Italian at 37 percent, and American at 43 percent, making American the most bookable of the hard cuisines.
Nolita is the hardest neighborhood, open on only 2 percent of checked dates, followed by the West Village at 12 percent and Midtown East at 14 percent. San Francisco's Chinatown is at 14 percent, Jackson Square at 19 percent, and the East Village at 30 percent.
Tock uses fixed calendar-date drops 62 percent of the time, most often at 10 AM. SevenRooms does so 38 percent of the time and OpenTable 30 percent, both most often at 9 AM. Resy uses calendar drops only 11 percent of the time, relying mostly on a rolling daily window, and drops most often at midnight.
Open rate is the share of the visible booking window that held at least one bookable table at the last check. A 0 percent score does not mean a restaurant never seats anyone. It means a released table almost never stays open long enough for an ordinary diner to find and book it, so a cancellation is the way in.
SnagRes re-checks 140 restaurants every few minutes, and this study covers 8,043,140 checks as of September 2026. Release times are confirmed against each restaurant's own booking listing. SnagRes alerts you the moment a table opens by email or text. 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 , compare Resy, OpenTable, Tock, and SevenRooms side by side, see the hardest tables right now , and read why reservations are so hard to get .
Measured across 8.04 million availability checks, or 8,043,140 in total as of September 2026, 25 of the 140 hardest-to-book restaurants SnagRes tracks across New York City and San Francisco showed a bookable table on 0 percent of dates. That is 18 percent of the tracked list that is effectively never openly bookable. For every one of those rooms, the only realistic way in is a cancellation.
SnagRes tracks 140 restaurants, 80 in New York and 60 in San Francisco, and re-checks each one every few minutes. An open rate is the share of the visible booking window that held at least one bookable table at the last check, so a 0 percent score does not mean a restaurant never seats anyone. It means a released table almost never sits open long enough for an ordinary person to find it and book it. The 25 rooms at 0 percent include Torrisi, The Polo Bar, Tatiana, Semma, The Four Horsemen, and 4 Charles Prime Rib in New York, and State Bird Provisions, House of Prime Rib, and Z & Y in San Francisco. New York carries almost all of them: 22 of its 80 rooms against 3 of San Francisco's 60.
New York is meaningfully harder than San Francisco. Across the tracked list, New York restaurants averaged 34 percent of dates open and 30 of the 80 sit at 0 percent, while San Francisco restaurants averaged 56 percent of dates open and only 11 of the 60 sit at 0 percent. So a typical San Francisco room on this list is open on more than half of its dates, and a typical New York room on barely a third.
The gap is not only about demand. It is about how the booking platforms behave. New York is dominated by Resy, and Resy mostly uses a rolling daily window rather than fixed calendar drops. Because a Resy restaurant trickles out one new date at a time, most New York openings a normal diner can catch come from cancellations at unpredictable hours, not from a scheduled release. That is exactly the kind of opening an availability alert is built to catch, and it is why the harder city is also the one where watching for cancellations matters most.
Ranked by average open rate, where a lower number means a harder table, the hardest cuisines on the tracked list cluster at the top. Chinese and Indian rooms are in a class of their own, open on barely a tenth to a seventh of their dates. Semma, a South Indian room in New York, is one of the 0 percent restaurants that pulls the Indian average down.
Chinese: open on 12 percent of checked dates, the hardest cuisine we track.
Indian: open on 15 percent of checked dates.
Vietnamese: open on 24 percent of checked dates.
Mediterranean: open on 27 percent of checked dates.
Italian: open on 37 percent of checked dates, the tier that includes Carbone and Torrisi.
American: open on 43 percent of checked dates, the most bookable of the hard cuisines.
The same ranking by neighborhood shows how concentrated the hardest tables are. Nolita, home to Torrisi, is open on just 2 percent of dates, the single hardest neighborhood on the list. The West Village, where 4 Charles Prime Rib sits, and Midtown East, home to The Polo Bar, follow close behind.
Nolita: open on 2 percent of checked dates, the hardest neighborhood we track.
West Village: open on 12 percent of checked dates.
Midtown East: open on 14 percent of checked dates.
Chinatown, San Francisco: open on 14 percent of checked dates.
Jackson Square, San Francisco: open on 19 percent of checked dates.
East Village: open on 30 percent of checked dates.
The most novel finding in this study is that the four booking platforms drop their tables in genuinely different ways, and knowing which platform a restaurant uses tells you when to watch. We classify each release as either a fixed calendar-date drop or a rolling daily window, and we record the hour each restaurant most commonly opens new dates.
Tock: 62 percent of restaurants use fixed calendar-date drops, most commonly at 10 AM, making it the most batch-driven platform.
SevenRooms: 38 percent use fixed calendar drops, most commonly at 9 AM.
OpenTable: 30 percent use fixed calendar drops, most commonly at 9 AM.
Resy: only 11 percent use fixed calendar drops, it mostly uses a rolling daily window, and its most common drop time is midnight.
In plain terms, Resy trickles one new date out at midnight, while Tock drops a batch of dates at 10 AM, and that single difference changes the entire strategy. On a Tock restaurant there is one scheduled moment to race for. On a Resy restaurant there is no batch to catch, so the openings a real diner grabs are almost all cancellations, arriving at hours no person can predict.
Put the patterns together and the picture is clear. New York is the harder city, it is dominated by Resy, and Resy releases on a rolling daily window rather than in batches. That combination means most catchable New York tables are cancellations, freed at random hours as plans change in the final days before a booking. No person can refresh a restaurant every few minutes for two straight days, which is the gap an availability alert fills. SnagRes publishes this study because it is the party that actually measures reservation availability at this scale. Release times here are confirmed against each restaurant's own booking listing, and availability is observed every few minutes rather than sampled once a day. SnagRes alerts you the moment a table opens. It does not book for you, and it never holds a table under someone else's name.
We measured 8.04 million reservation checks at 140 top NYC and SF restaurants: 25 are open 0 percent of dates, and New York is the hardest.
A data study of 8.04 million reservation availability checks across 140 hard-to-book restaurants in New York City and San Francisco, ranking the hardest cuisines and neighborhoods and how each booking platform releases tables.
Reservation availability measured across 8,043,140 checks at 140 of the hardest-to-book restaurants in New York City and San Francisco, covering open rate, release time, and booking window by restaurant, cuisine, neighborhood, and platform.
Keep reading: The hardest tables right now · Resy vs OpenTable vs Tock vs SevenRooms · How we measure this