How to Get a Reservation at Annette (Denver)

Annette takes reservations on OpenTable, or by phone on (720) 710-9975, and those are the only two doors into the book. What the restaurant does not publish anywhere on its own site, as of September 2026, is how far ahead the calendar opens or what hour a new date goes live. No booking window, no release clock, no lottery. Anyone quoting you a specific minute for Annette is guessing, so this guide does two things instead: it shows you how to measure the actual window yourself in a single day, and it explains why a wood-fired restaurant in a converted Aurora factory building is one of the hardest weeknight tables in metro Denver.

Which platform Annette books on

The restaurant’s visit page states it plainly: “Reservations are made on OpenTable or you can call our phone number and chat with our front of house.” That is the whole system. There is no Resy listing to watch, no Tock ticket to buy, no deposit page, no separate waitlist product bolted on the side. Every booking link on the site, including the one in the main navigation, lands on the same OpenTable listing for the Aurora address.

Two practical consequences. First, the phone is a genuine second channel rather than a polite fiction, and at a room this size a human who knows what is actually open that night can sometimes place a two-top the app will not show you. Worth one call before you conclude a date is impossible. Second, upstairs is a different restaurant with a different book: Traveling Mercies, the oyster and cocktail bar above Annette, takes its own reservations on OpenTable separately. Searching for Annette will never show you a Traveling Mercies seat, and people regularly miss that the building has two answers.

When reservations open

Honestly: unknown, because Annette does not say. Rather than invent a number, measure it. Open the OpenTable listing this evening, set your party size, and scroll the calendar until the dates stop being selectable. Write down the last bookable date. Check again tomorrow morning and write down the new one. If the far edge has moved forward by exactly one day, Annette runs a rolling window and the gap between today and that edge is your booking horizon, in days. If the edge jumps by a week or a month at once, the release is batched rather than rolling. Repeat the check a couple of hours apart and you will also bracket the hour of the flip. One day of looking beats any number you read on a listicle, and the general mechanics of a timed opening are laid out in when restaurant reservations open and the 10am opening explained, which describes the convention most American restaurants copy even when they never announce it.

One more thing worth knowing before you plan: the ceiling on availability here is time, not popularity. Annette serves dinner only, Tuesday through Sunday, 4:30pm to 9pm, and is closed Mondays. That is roughly twenty seven hours of service in a whole week, with no lunch, no brunch and no late seating to absorb overflow. A restaurant open for lunch and dinner seven days has two or three times the inventory to sell. Annette has a narrow band of evening, and within it the 6pm to 7:30pm block is what almost everybody wants. The thinking behind how early to start planning around a room like that is in how far in advance to book.

What actually works at the release minute

None of this is clever. It is the boring preparation that decides who gets the table once you have worked out when the flip happens.

• Be logged into OpenTable the night before. Account confirmed, phone number verified, card on file if the listing asks for one. A password reset takes ninety seconds and the good slots do not last that long.
• Decide the date and the acceptable times first. A first choice, a second, and a weeknight you would genuinely be happy with. Browsing after the window opens means choosing from a list that is shrinking while you read it.
• Search as two. A two-top fits in far more places than a four in a dining room this size, and OpenTable will simply return fewer dates for the bigger party. If you have six, do not fight the app at all, call instead.
• Take 5pm or 8:15pm. An early or late seat at Annette is the same kitchen and the same wood fire. Holding out for 7pm on a Saturday is the most efficient way to end the morning with nothing, and with a 9pm close there is no 10pm consolation slot to fall back on.
• Refresh the availability page, not the whole site. One tab, party size and date already set, reloading the results view. Frantic tab-switching across five browser windows loses to one person reloading a single screen calmly.

Cancellations are the second wave

A sold-out calendar is not a closed one. Bookings made weeks out are made by people whose plans change, and every one of those changes puts a table back into OpenTable. Annette publishes no cancellation terms, no fee and no deadline anywhere first-party, so treat the returns as a habit rather than a schedule. Most rooms see a bulge one to two days out, because that is where the industry standard penalty window sits and it is when wobbling diners commit or bail, then a smaller trickle on the day itself and in the last hour or two before service. How those terms shape the timing is covered in how cancellation policies work, and why a freed seat disappears before you can click it is in why tables vanish instantly.

The Annette-specific wrinkle is that the second wave is thin here. Fewer bookable seats means fewer of them come back, and a returned Friday at 6:30pm is visible to everyone watching at the same moment. Checking twice a day on your lunch break is not a strategy, it is a lottery ticket you buy occasionally.

Bar seats and walk-ins

The room has a bar and chef’s counter set close to the wood-fired kitchen, which the restaurant describes as “an intimate view of the craft, energy, and care that define every meal we serve,” plus a covered patio with hinged window-walls, fans and heaters that works in Colorado weather year round. What Annette does not publish is whether any of those seats are held back for walk-ins, so do not turn up assuming a counter stool is waiting. Call and ask how the counter is handled on the night you want. It is one question and the front of house answers the phone. The general etiquette of playing a door like this, including why arriving at opening beats arriving at seven, is in whether hard restaurants take walk-ins.

The honest fallback is upstairs. Traveling Mercies is an oyster and cocktail bar in the same building, with its own separate OpenTable book, and a night that starts there and never makes it down to the dining room is still a good night out in Stanley Marketplace. If you need the wood fire specifically, the rest of the metro’s contested tables are collected in the Denver hub, and Safta is the closest thing to a like-for-like swap in tone, though it books on its own schedule.

Set it and forget it

Every path above collapses into the same instruction: be looking at the exact second a table exists, on a calendar whose release hour the restaurant has never published. That is a watching problem, and people are bad at it. SeatSwiper watches the dates and party size you actually want on OpenTable continuously and books the instant something appears, whether that is a new date entering the window or a Friday given back at 4pm. It books on your own OpenTable account, in your name, so nothing is resold or transferred. The first booking is free, then it is a flat $5 charged only when it actually gets you the table, with no subscription, and starting a watch on a specific sold-out date costs $1. It covers Resy, SevenRooms and OpenTable only, which includes Annette, and on a single returned two-top it can lose a race. Much better than refreshing by hand. Never a guarantee. More on the mechanics in how SeatSwiper works.