Antoine’s New Orleans: How Far Ahead to Book a Table

Antoine’s has served French Creole food from 713 Saint Louis Street since 1868, and served it under one family since 1840, which makes it the oldest family run restaurant in the country and one of the few dining rooms in America where the building is part of the reason you came. Jules Alciatore invented Oysters Rockefeller here and the recipe is still a house secret. Rick Blount runs the place as the fifth generation. None of that makes it a hard table, and this guide will not pretend otherwise. Antoine’s is a genuinely winnable reservation. Its private rooms alone hold something like seven hundred people, which is capacity no small tasting counter can offer, so demand that would seal a thirty seat room gets absorbed here. What you are really managing is a date weeks or months out, a short list of seatings everyone wants, and the reasonable wish to book it once and never think about it again. Here is how, as of September 2026.

What the OpenTable calendar shows you, and what it does not

Reservations run on OpenTable, and you can prove it in one click: the reserve button on antoines.com hands you straight to the restaurant’s own OpenTable listing rather than to any other platform. The more useful fact sits on the same page in the restaurant’s own words, that reservations are limited on OpenTable and guests who cannot book online should call 504 581 4422. Read that sentence twice, because it changes how much weight the calendar deserves. The online book is a window onto part of the house, not the whole house. A Friday that looks sealed on your phone is often not sealed in the building, and the phone is what separates the two. It also means anything watching that calendar, a person refreshing it or software doing the same job, can only ever see the share of tables the restaurant has chosen to put online.

Neither the restaurant nor its listing publishes a release hour or a fixed advance window as of September 2026, so there is no midnight to sit up for. You can measure the runway yourself in about a minute: open the booking calendar, page it forward until dates stop returning times, and note that last selectable date. Check again tomorrow. If the far edge has moved forward by one day, you are looking at a rolling window that gains a day at a time, which is the ordinary shape and the one that rewards a single calendar reminder instead of an alarm. The theory behind window lengths, and why a long one carries its own quiet pressure, is in how far in advance you can book a restaurant.

Carnival, Réveillon, and the dates the Quarter competes for

The occasions that tighten this book are local, and they are not the ones a visitor guesses. Three of the private rooms are named Rex, Proteus and Twelfth Night Revelers after Carnival organisations, and those names are not decoration: krewe banquets have been held in this building for generations. From Twelfth Night on 6 January through Mardi Gras itself, the Quarter arranges its evenings around parade routes and ball schedules, and Antoine’s sits inside that machinery rather than beside it. If your date lands in Carnival season, treat it as the tightest stretch of the year and claim it as early as the calendar allows.

December is the second pressure point and it has a name here. Réveillon, the old Creole Christmas feast, has been revived citywide as a month of holiday menus, and it arrives alongside office parties in the private rooms, family gatherings and New Year’s Eve. August is a different kind of busy: COOLinary runs the 1st through the 31st with prix fixe lunch, brunch and dinner menus, and those are booked through their own reservation links rather than the ordinary calendar, so an August visit needs you looking in the right place more than looking early. After that come the reliable spikes any local will name: French Quarter Fest in April, Jazz Fest across the last weekend of April and the first of May when the city’s entire restaurant supply is spoken for, Tulane and Loyola graduation weekend, Mother’s Day, and Saints home Sundays and the Sugar Bowl, which collide with brunch rather than with dinner. Underneath all of it runs the steady traffic of anniversaries and milestone birthdays that a restaurant this old attracts, and if that is your reason for coming, the lead times work the same way as any other anniversary dinner reservation.

A nine o’clock kitchen decides which seatings go first

Antoine’s does not run late. Dinner is served Monday through Saturday with the kitchen closing at nine, lunch runs from half past eleven to two, and Sunday is brunch with a live jazz band rather than dinner at all. The site posts a summer schedule separately from its fall and holiday hours, so check the exact day you are booking before you build an evening around it.

That early close is the most useful thing to understand about this book, because it compresses a whole evening of demand into roughly three and a half hours. There is no late seating to fall back on and no ten o’clock table clearing at the last minute. In practice the contested block on Friday and Saturday runs from about half past six to eight, and it is the first thing to go on any date that matters. The half past five seating sits open far longer than people expect, and in a room this formal an early dinner costs you nothing: you get the dining room at its calmest and you are back out on Saint Louis Street with the evening still ahead of you. Sunday jazz brunch behaves more like a weekend dinner than a brunch, since it is the single most requested seating of the week and visitors book it first. Weekday lunch is the softest reservation in the building and the best read of the place going: the same kitchen, the same rooms, a fraction of the searches. If your goal is simply to eat here on this trip rather than to stage an occasion, book lunch and stop worrying about it. There is also a door that needs no reservation at all: Hermes Bar next door at 725 Saint Louis Street, which opens in the morning on Monday, Friday and the weekend, in the late afternoon midweek, and runs a happy hour from four to six on weekdays. For how this room sits against the rest of the city, the New Orleans hard tables guide has the landscape, and Galatoire’s, a few minutes away on Bourbon Street, is the other Quarter institution running an entirely different booking culture.

Thirteen guests, one check, and where the app stops

Online booking here is for ordinary tables. Parties of thirteen or more, and anyone who wants a private room, are asked to call 504 581 4422 or send the contact form instead, and the private dining side commits to answering an event request within seventy two hours. Knowing that saves you an evening trying to force a fourteen top through a widget that will not take one. The rooms are the reason people plan around this place at all. The Escargot Room seats twelve and the 1840 Room fourteen; Proteus and the Burgundy Room take twenty five each; the Mystery Room holds thirty; the Rex Room, the Capitol Room and Maison Verte seat forty; the Twelfth Night Revelers Suite takes eighty; the Main Dining Room a hundred; the Japanese Room a hundred and fifty; and the Large Annex two hundred and twenty. Rooms can be combined, several of the upstairs rooms have balconies over Saint Louis Street, and there is an elevator as well as the stairs.

Two house rules are better learned now than at the end of the night. Antoine’s issues one guest check per table and will not split it into separate or itemised checks, although it will take up to five forms of payment against that single check. And the dress code is business casual, with jackets and collared shirts strongly suggested for gentlemen, no athletic or beach clothing, no baseball caps and no flip flops, enforced at the manager’s discretion. Put both in the message when you invite people, not in a text on the day.

Book it once, then let it go

The routine that turns this restaurant into a non event is short. Pick the date, pick a seating band rather than one exact minute, book at your real party size, and take the time you are offered instead of holding out for a perfect one. A confirmed six o’clock on the right date beats an unconfirmed seven, because you can improve a time you already hold and you cannot improve one you never had. If your date still sits past the far edge of the calendar, set one reminder for the morning it becomes reachable and forget about it until then. If plans move later, modify the existing reservation instead of cancelling and rebooking: modifying keeps your place in the book while it looks for the new time, whereas cancelling first hands the table back to everyone else and starts you over. For Carnival season or a December date, add a couple of weeks to whatever lead time feels like enough, because those are the two stretches when the ordinary rules about this being an easy table stop applying.

Letting software hold the date for you

Two moments decide whether you sit down at the seating you actually wanted. One is the morning your date first becomes bookable, which you can plan for with a reminder. The other is whenever somebody else gives a table back, which you cannot, because it happens at no particular hour and the returned table is visible to everyone at once. SeatSwiper exists for the second one. It watches OpenTable, along with Resy and SevenRooms, for a specific restaurant, date range, party size and time band, and it books the table the moment one opens, whether that is fresh availability or somebody cancelling. It books on your own OpenTable account, in your own name, for your own dinner. Nothing is resold, transferred or listed. The first booking is free, after which it is a flat $5 and only when it actually books you a table, with no subscription; if you want it standing watch on a date that is already full, starting that watch costs $1.

The limits matter more than usual at this address. It can only see what the restaurant puts on OpenTable, and Antoine’s says plainly that its online allocation is limited, so on a night the calendar shows nothing, a call to 504 581 4422 beats any software ever written. It covers Resy, SevenRooms and OpenTable and nothing else, and it can lose a race for a single table. Where it earns its keep at a restaurant like this one is the upgrade rather than the rescue. A table booked two months out is exactly the kind people hand back as the date approaches, plans firm up and party sizes change, so the same watch that chases an impossible reservation somewhere else can sit on a booking you already hold and move you from half past five to seven o’clock without you checking anything. Claim the date now, keep the confirmation, and let the watch do the improving.