Double Chicken Please Reservations: Resy at Midnight, 6 Days Out

Double Chicken Please is the cocktail bar at 115 Allen Street on the Lower East Side that GN Chan and Faye Chan opened in 2020, and it has had a line outside most nights since. In 2023 The World’s 50 Best Bars ranked it second in the world and named it the best bar in North America, which turned a neighbourhood favourite into a stop on every visitor’s list. The question people search for is whether you can reserve it at all. The honest answer is: a little, in one room, six days out at midnight, and most of the seats are not on any app. This guide covers how the two rooms work as of October 2026, when the Resy book opens and how to count to it, what the line and the text waitlist are really like, and which night to try.

How Double Chicken Please reservations work

The bar is two rooms with two different rules, and the restaurant’s own Visit page spells both out. The front room, Free Range, takes no reservations at all; it is the room with the plinko-style menu of shareable dishes, and at busy times the hosts control how many people come in. The back room, The Coop, is the seated cocktail room with the full menu, and it is the only part of the bar you can book. Even there, the Visit page is clear about the split: “Over 70% of seating in The Coop is first come first serve.” The rest, under a third of the back room, is the reservation book.

That book lives on Resy, and the bar says third-party platform reservations are not honored, so a table bought anywhere else is not a table. Its rules, from the same page: reservations are for groups of up to six and open six days in advance at midnight. Each booking carries a $2.50 per person fee, charged when you confirm and not refunded if you modify or cancel. A table is held for up to ten minutes past its time before it is subject to cancellation, so running late here costs more than an awkward apology. The bar can accommodate parties of up to eight, but a group of seven or eight is not something the online book will sell you.

When do Double Chicken Please reservations open? Midnight, six days out

Six days at midnight is a short window and an inconvenient hour, which is the point: it thins the field to people who stayed up. The arithmetic is where people slip. At 12:00am, the new date that appears is the one six days after the day that is just starting. So for a table on Saturday, November 14, 2026, the date should appear at midnight as Saturday, November 7 turns into Sunday, November 8. In practice that means being on Resy late on the Saturday a week before, with the party size set and a card saved, rather than waking up on the Sunday morning to find the slots gone. Check the count once before you rely on it: on any evening, scroll the bar’s Resy calendar to the last date you can select and confirm it sits six days ahead.

With so few booked seats, the first minutes after midnight are the whole contest for a weekend. A weeknight is a different story, and the bar is closed on Mondays (its listed hours run Tuesday to Sunday), so Tuesday is the first night of its week and usually the most forgiving. Resy’s Notify alert can tell you when something on your date opens later, but it tells everyone watching that date at once, which is why it so often arrives after the table is gone (the reasons are in why Resy Notify rarely works).

The line, the text waitlist, and when to arrive

Since most of the seats are walk-in, the line is the main way in, and it has a system. The line tracker damnlines.com describes it: you sign up with the host, get a text when a seat opens, and then have ten minutes to come back. It reports, citing Resy’s guide, waits of anywhere from about 90 minutes to four or five hours depending on when you join, with Friday and Saturday lists running 20 to 25 groups deep at once. Its advice on timing is specific: the line typically starts around 4:30pm for the 5pm open, staff suggest arriving by about 4:40pm on weekdays and 4:30pm on weekends, and both rooms fill in roughly half an hour once the doors open. The busiest windows it names are 5pm to 7pm and 10:30pm to 11pm.

Put that together and there are two sensible plans. Be outside before 5pm, early in the week, and you are in the first wave. Or put your name down early, accept that the text may come hours later, and treat the Lower East Side as the waiting room; the ten-minute return window means staying a few blocks away, not across town. The bar keeps late hours, which helps: as of October 2026 it is open 5pm to 1am Tuesday to Thursday, 5pm to 1:30am on Friday and Saturday and 5pm to midnight on Sunday, with the kitchen open until 11pm (midnight on Friday and Saturday). For how other hard rooms in the city handle walk-ins, see NYC hard restaurants that take walk-ins.

What you are queueing for

The drinks are built to taste like dishes, and the food is mostly fried chicken. Resy’s guide to the bar, last updated in June 2024, singled out the Cold Pizza (tequila with tomato and basil), the Japanese Cold Noodle, which won the Bacardí Legacy global cocktail competition, and the Red Eye Gravy, and called the fried chicken sandwiches the most celebrated thing on the menu. Menus change, so treat that as the flavour of the place rather than a promise of what is pouring tonight. The two rooms feel different, too. Free Range is the more playful front bar, and The Coop is the seated room most people picture when they think of the place, which is why its small reservation book is so contested.

House rules worth knowing

Bring a valid photo ID; the bar asks for one on arrival. Guests under 21 are welcome in The Coop only between 5pm and 10pm, which makes an early table or an early place in line the only option for a group that includes a teenager. And because the $2.50 fee is per person and not refunded if you change or cancel, a booking for six carries $15 in fees that you lose if plans change. That small cost is also why the book behaves the way it does when plans change: there is no big deposit deadline pushing people to cancel at a predictable hour, so returned tables appear whenever someone’s night falls apart, often the same day. The ten-minute hold adds a second source, a table that goes back into play when a party does not show.

For where Double Chicken Please sits among the city’s other hard rooms, most of them restaurants rather than bars, the hardest restaurants to book in NYC guide has the wider picture.

Putting a watch on The Coop’s Resy book

The reserved part of The Coop comes down to being on the Resy page in the instant a table exists: midnight six days out, or the unannounced minute when someone gives one back. Neither is a good job for a person with a day job. SeatSwiper watches Resy, SevenRooms and OpenTable, and Double Chicken Please takes its reservations on Resy, so one watch on its page covers both the midnight opening and the cancellations after it. You give it your dates and party size, set it once, and it books the table the moment one opens or someone cancels. It books on your own Resy account, in your name, for your own night out, and nothing is resold or transferred, which matters at a bar that refuses third-party bookings. The first booking is free. After that it is a flat $5, charged only when it actually books the table, with no subscription. A cancellation watch on a date that is already full costs $1 to start, charged when the watch begins even if no table ever opens; that $1 is not covered by the free first booking and is not refunded, and the same $5 applies if the watch wins you the table. The bar’s own $2.50 per person Resy fee is separate and still applies. The honest limits: it only works on those three platforms, it needs your Resy login, and it can lose a race for a single table. It also cannot stand in the line or answer the host’s text for you, and since most of the bar is walk-in, the 4:30pm line is still the bigger door.