Beaumont’s Chicago Reservations: How to Get a Table

For forty-four years, 2020 N Halsted was The Beaumont: a late-night Lincoln Park bar in an 1890 building, open until 4am, sticky floors and beer buckets and bouncers. It closed in 2023. The Abu-Taleb family bought the property in 2024, gutted it in what has been described as one of the most intensive restaurant buildouts in recent Chicago memory, and reopened it as Beaumont’s, an old-school tavern-driven American restaurant with a hidden steakhouse in the former second-floor apartments. The kitchen runs American classics next to French and Italian staples, handmade pastas and charcoal-fired steak frites, coal-roasted rainbow trout in absinthe cream, dover sole meunière, a lasagna with mushroom duxelles tucked between the sheets, and a griddled double cheeseburger that people order without looking at the rest of the menu. The Infatuation scored it 9.1. It is, at the moment, one of the hardest tables in the city. Here is how the book actually works, as of September 2026.

The quirk nobody notices: two books, one building

Beaumont’s and The Bull Moose are not the same reservation. The tavern on the ground floor and the 76-seat steakhouse above it, all tufted booths, wood panelling and two fireplaces, named for the owners’ grandfather, run on completely separate calendars with separate listings. Beaumont’s own reservations page says so plainly and links you upstairs: if your preferred time is not available downstairs, consider joining them at The Bull Moose instead. Almost nobody does this. People search the tavern, see a wall of grey on a Saturday, and give up while a different room in the same building, with its own dry-aged beef program and its own inventory, sits one click away. If your goal is dinner at 2020 N Halsted on a specific night rather than one exact menu, you have two chances at it, not one, and they empty at different speeds.

Twenty-one days, rolling, and no announced hour

Beaumont’s takes reservations through OpenTable, embedded directly on beaumontschicago.com/reservations, and the house states the terms itself: reservations are available on a 21 day, rolling basis. Rolling is the operative word. There is no weekly batch and no Sunday-night flood of a fortnight’s worth of tables. One brand new date slides onto the far edge of the calendar each day, and the furthest night you can click today is three weeks from today.

Two things about that number are worth knowing. First, it changed. Reviews written in the weeks after the reopening reported a 14 day window, and the restaurant has since widened it, so any guide still telling you to count back a fortnight is working from stale information. Second, and more usefully, Beaumont’s has never published a release hour. That matters because several of the other 21 day rooms in this city, including Armitage Alehouse, load their new date at 9am Chicago time on the nose, and people assume Beaumont’s does too. It has not said so. Treat any specific minute you read online as a guess until you have watched the calendar yourself. The reliable move is to open the OpenTable widget on the restaurant’s own page, scroll the date picker to the last night that is still selectable, and note it. That edge is your window, measured rather than assumed. Check the morning your target date first appears on it. The general mechanics of a timed opening are in when restaurant reservations open.

What is actually on the board

The honest picture of near-term availability is not empty, it is lopsided. Tables do surface inside the next day or two, but at 4:30pm or 9pm, the two ends of service nobody fights for. The block from roughly 6:30 to 8pm on a Friday or Saturday is what disappears on release day and essentially never returns intact. So the strategy splits cleanly by what you actually want. If you want the room on a particular Saturday at 7:30, that is a three-weeks-out claim made the morning your date enters range. If you want to eat the trout this week, take the 4:30 or the 9 and stop negotiating. An early table in a tavern is not a consolation prize, and the bar is at its best before the room fills.

Party size is capped online. Beaumont’s is currently accepting reservations for up to 8 guests, and anything larger goes through its private dining team rather than the booking widget, which is a slower and more formal path. A 2-top is both the most common table in the room and the most common thing that gets released, so if you can go as two, go as two. Search that way even if there are four of you, then ask the host about a second pair of seats at the bar.

The 33-seat bar is a permanent back door

This is the part that changes the whole calculation. The bar at Beaumont’s seats 33 and it will always be walk-in only, first come and first served, no reservations, ever. That is the restaurant’s own stated policy rather than a rumour, and it sits at the centre of the room instead of being tucked away as an afterthought, which is exactly where you want to be in a restored 1979 bar. You can also simply turn up and put your name on the wait list for a table. For the timing tactics that make bar seats work at rooms like this, the walk-in guide covers arrival windows in detail, but the Beaumont’s-specific read is the opening hour. Service starts at 4pm Wednesday and Thursday and 3pm Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Being there in the first thirty minutes on a weeknight is close to a guarantee of a stool.

The schedule itself is worth checking before you plan anything, because it is still moving. As of this writing the room runs Wednesday and Thursday 4pm to 11pm, Friday and Saturday 3pm to 11pm, and Sunday 3pm to 10pm, with Mondays and Tuesdays closed for the first few weeks of the run. The restaurant has said it will be open seven days a week this fall with brunch service soon after. Until that happens, a six-service week compresses all of Lincoln Park’s demand into five nights, which is a real part of why this book feels tighter than the 21 day window suggests. When Monday and Tuesday come back, they will immediately be the softest nights on the calendar.

Cancellations and when they surface

Beaumont’s does not publish a deposit or a cancellation fee on its own site, and there is no prepaid ticket to buy, so you are booking an ordinary table. Whatever terms apply are the ones shown inside the OpenTable flow, which is worth reading on the confirmation screen rather than assuming. The practical consequence of having no punishing published deadline is that returned tables do not bunch at one tidy hour. They trickle. OpenTable puts a released seat straight back into public inventory the moment someone gives it up, so a Saturday at 7:30 that has been gone for two weeks can reappear at 11am on a Tuesday and be taken again within a minute. The densest stretch is still the 24 to 48 hours before service, when people firm up their week, but at a room this new the whole three-week window leaks. Speculative bookings made on release morning get released as plans change. A date that looks sold out at ten days out often is not sold out by the time it arrives. For how Beaumont’s sits against the rest of the city’s tough rooms, the Chicago hard-tables guide has the wider landscape.

Letting software do the watching

Every path above reduces to the same instruction: be looking at the exact second a table exists. That is either 21 days ahead of your date at an hour the restaurant has never announced, or the unpredictable Tuesday morning somebody gives back a prime Saturday. A person cannot do both, and refreshing OpenTable between meetings is how the good slots get lost. SeatSwiper watches the exact Beaumont’s table you want, your date range, your party size, on OpenTable around the clock, and books it the instant one appears. It books on your own OpenTable account, in your own name. Nothing is resold and nothing is transferred. You set it once and walk away. The first booking is free, then it is a flat $5 and only when it actually gets you the table, with no subscription; if you want it standing watch on a specific sold-out night for a cancellation, starting that watch is $1. Two honest limits: it works on Resy, SevenRooms and OpenTable only, and it can lose a race for a single hot table even though it is a far better watcher than any human. Worth doing in parallel, since Beaumont’s and The Bull Moose are separate listings, is watching both. And if neither ever comes through, the 33 seats at that bar are still yours for the price of showing up at three in the afternoon.