Metropolitan Grill Reservations: Booking the Date a Year Out

The Met occupies the ground floor of the Marion Building, a 1903 address at Second Avenue and Marion Street, and it has been Seattle’s deal-closing steakhouse since 1983. A sixty foot black marble bar runs down one side of it. The kitchen sears over mesquite charcoal and runs what the house calls a global steak program: USDA Prime from Double R Ranch in eastern Washington, American Wagyu from Snake River Farms, and Japanese A-5. The wine list has taken a Wine Spectator Grand Award nine years running, and the restaurant sells a bottle it made with Drew Bledsoe and Josh McDaniels of Doubleback. If you want one detail that explains the clientele, the house runs an annual contest where you guess the closing value of the Dow and win a gift card. This is a financial district room, and it behaves like one.

Which brings us to the useful part. This is not one of the city’s impossible tables and nobody should tell you otherwise. When the calendar was walked date by date in September 2026, almost every night in the next twelve months returned the entire grid of times, from the 4:00 PM opening to the 10:00 PM last seating, with nothing missing. Your problem is a different one. The night you care about is an anniversary in March or a client dinner in November, it is a long way off, and you would rather book it once and never think about it again. That is what this guide is for.

Where the book lives and how far it reaches

Every reservation path on themetropolitangrill.com resolves to SevenRooms, venue page metropolitangrill. There is no Resy listing, no OpenTable listing, and nothing else worth checking as a backup, so the SevenRooms calendar is the whole picture. The house line is 206-624-3287 for anything the widget will not do.

The runway is the headline finding. Paging the date picker forward in September 2026, the last day that still sold dinner sat exactly 364 days ahead, and the very next day returned request-only times instead of bookable ones. That is a full year minus a day, which is about as long a horizon as any American steakhouse offers, and it changes the exercise completely. There is no alarm to set and no minute to survive. If you want a Saturday next August, it is almost certainly sitting there right now waiting for you to take it. The restaurant does not publish that number, so measure it yourself rather than trusting mine: page the calendar forward until the last day that still shows bookable times, then count the days from today. Why one house gives you a year and the next gives you three weeks is covered in how to book a table months in advance.

Lunch is a bar stool, not a reservation

This trips people up more than anything else here, so it is worth being blunt about. Lunch runs Tuesday through Friday from 11:00am to 3:00pm and it happens in the bar, on a walk-in basis. The calendar reflects that honestly: a lunch shift does load Tuesday through Friday, but on every single lunch date checked, near and far, it returned request-only times rather than an instant confirmation. You cannot lock a weekday lunch here the way you lock a dinner. If you are bringing someone downtown at noon, plan to arrive and take a stool, or call ahead and ask. Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays load no lunch shift at all.

Dinner is the opposite and it is generous. It runs every night of the week from 4:00pm to a 10:00pm last seating, in quarter hour slots, and the bar stays open until 11pm. Seven nights of dinner instead of the five most steakhouses of this rank offer is a large part of why the calendar looks the way it does. One quirk worth knowing so you do not misread it: 6:45 PM comes back as a request on every date, including dates a year out that are otherwise completely empty. That is a slot the house holds back, not a sign the night is busy.

What actually fills this room

Business is the base load and it is spread across the week rather than piled onto Saturday. Four private spaces sit off the main room: the Chairman’s Room seats forty and holds seventy five standing behind its own entrance, the Board Room seats twenty six, the Vintage Room seats eighteen and combines with the Board Room for eighty standing, and the new Met Wine Cellar seats six for a tasting led by the wine director. Those rooms get spoken for months ahead in November and December by company parties, and a booked private room does not show as a closure on the public calendar. It just quietly makes the main floor tighter than the date looks.

Then there is football, which is genuinely a Seattle specific here. The restaurant runs happy hour in the bar Monday through Friday from 3:00 to 5:30 and states plainly that it is excluded on home football game days, because the bar is a different animal on those afternoons. It also advertises a Game Day Sunday Brunch of breakfast classics and premium cuts. Worth knowing: no brunch shift had been loaded onto the calendar on any weekend date sampled through the end of December, so that service is added by hand when a schedule firms up rather than sitting there all season. If your date is a home game Sunday, check the calendar again closer to it instead of assuming brunch is not happening.

The holiday calendar has hard edges that catch people every year. The restaurant states it is closed Thanksgiving. Christmas Eve runs from 11am with an 8:30pm last seating, which the booking feed confirms by ending that night’s times at 8:30 PM rather than the usual 10:00. Christmas Day opens at 1pm and sells straight through the afternoon, which is unusual and genuinely useful if you have family in town. New Year’s Eve runs a 10:30pm last seating in the dining room with the bar going to a 1:00am last call, and New Year’s Day runs 2pm to 9:30pm. One honest warning. When those dates were checked, the special holiday shifts had not been loaded yet and Thanksgiving was still returning an ordinary evening of bookable times even though the restaurant says it is closed. Trust the holiday notice on the site over the calendar, and phone to confirm anything landing on a holiday.

Which seatings go first and which hold

• The contested window is 6:30 to 7:00 on a Friday or Saturday, and only inside about a week. Two days out on a Saturday, the single time missing from the whole evening was 6:30. Eight days out on a Friday, it was 7:00. Every sampled date beyond that, at one month, three months, six months and a year, came back with the grid intact.
• The 4:00 to 5:30 stretch is the widest open and the cheapest way in. It overlaps the weekday happy hour in the bar, so an early booking here is a genuinely different evening rather than a consolation prize.
• Late is wide open all week. The 9:00 to 10:00 band sells right up to the last seating on every night sampled, including weekends, and the bar carries you to 11pm after.
• Sunday through Thursday barely resists at any hour. If your occasion can move off the weekend, you will get the exact time you wanted rather than the nearest one.
• Party size is the real difficulty setting. One through ten confirm instantly online. Eleven flips the entire day to request, which matches what the restaurant says: parties of eleven or more call 206-624-3287. For a private room the events team is a separate line at 206-957-3221, and that is a different and much better door than fighting the widget.

Lock the date once, then stop thinking about it

The routine takes four minutes. Decide the night and the party size, pick two acceptable times before you open anything, sign in first so you are not typing details while a slot sits unconfirmed, and take the best time on offer even if it is not your ideal. Holding a 6:00 you can improve on beats holding nothing while you hope for a 7:00. Put the occasion in the reservation notes when you book rather than mentioning it on the night, because a kitchen carving Chateaubriand at the table would rather know in advance. Budget the twenty percent service charge that is added to every check, and either the $16 valet after 4pm or the $12 validated garage at the Norton Building if you are arriving before 5pm.

Plans move over a runway this long, and the right response is to change or cancel inside SevenRooms rather than simply not turning up. It costs nothing, it returns the table to someone else, and it keeps you in good standing at a restaurant you will want again. The general shape of what houses do and do not enforce is in restaurant cancellation policies. For where this room sits against the rooms in this city that genuinely fight back, the Seattle hard tables guide is the landscape, and El Gaucho in Belltown is the closest comparison, a similar horizon on a five night week instead of seven.

Letting software hold the date for you

Everything above still ends with a person in front of a calendar at some particular minute, which is a poor use of an evening. SeatSwiper watches the exact Metropolitan Grill table you want, your date, your party size and your time band, on SevenRooms, and books it the moment one opens. It books on your own SevenRooms account, in your own name. Nothing is resold or transferred. Set it once and go back to your life. The first booking is free, then it is a flat five dollars only when it actually books you the table, with no subscription, and putting a watch on a specific date you are hoping frees up costs one dollar to start.

The more interesting use at a room like this one is the upgrade. A table booked eight months ahead is exactly the kind of table people later give back, because that is what happens to plans over a long runway. So take the 6:00 you can have today for a Saturday next spring, leave a watch running on the 6:30 to 7:00 band, and let it move you when a prime seat comes back. Three honest limits. It works on Resy, SevenRooms and OpenTable only. It can lose a race for a single table like anybody else, so it is a far better watcher than a person refreshing a page but never a guarantee. And it cannot conjure inventory that does not exist online, which here means it will not help you with a weekday lunch or a party of eleven, both of which live on the phone rather than on the calendar.