Best time to book a restaurant in New York: what the data says

Dinner dominates: seatings from 5 to 9 PM each take roughly a tenth of all openings, the largest shares. Lunch hours come next. Breakfast, mid-afternoon and late night are small.

For a booker, this means most of the tables you will be alerted to are dinner tables. If you can dine at lunch or at an off-peak hour, you are choosing from a smaller pool, so a wider window helps an alert match.

Openings are spread almost evenly across the seven days. Weekdays and weekends each take a similar share, so there is no cheap night to aim for on volume alone.

That counts tables that opened. It says nothing about how many people wanted each one, so it cannot tell you which night is easiest to get.

Counting every opening, only 2% were for that same night. Most tables appear in the daily drop, days or weeks ahead, and those drops add many tables at once.

The other source is openings outside the regular release, which is how cancellations look in our data. At some restaurants the same-night share is high: as of November 11, 2026, 59% of I Sodi's openings were for the same night. The table above shows who.

At most New York restaurants we watch, most openings came outside the regular release, which is how cancellations look in our data. As of November 11, 2026, that was 90% of Carbone's openings and 93% of Monkey Bar's. For them the daily drop is only part of the story: likely cancellations appear through the day, at hours we cannot predict.

The last table shows who to be fastest for: the typical time a table stayed bookable, and the share gone within five minutes. At the bottom of that time, you cannot refresh your way to a table.

1. For restaurants that go in seconds or minutes, set an alert and keep the booking app signed in. Resy describes its own Notify as a virtual wait list; an alert holds nothing, so you must claim the table yourself.
2. For restaurants with a daily drop, be on the page at the release time. The release times page lists each one.
3. For restaurants with a same-night habit, check in the afternoon of the day you want to dine.
4. Be flexible on seating: the more hours and days you accept, the more openings an alert can match.

Table Alert checks each restaurant's public booking calendar around the clock. An opening is a table that appeared and was later taken. An opening outside the regular release is how a cancellation looks in our data; we cannot see why a table appeared. Figures cover 90 days through November 11, 2026, vouched restaurants only, and are rebuilt nightly.