CORE by Clare Smyth Reservations: How to Book on OpenTable

CORE occupies a quiet stretch of Kensington Park Road in Notting Hill, at number 92, behind a frontage that tells you almost nothing. Clare Smyth opened it in July 2017. It took two Michelin stars in 2019 in its first year of eligibility, a third in 2021, and became the first and only female led restaurant in the United Kingdom to hold three. It still holds all three in the 2026 Guide, and La Liste scored it 98 out of 100 for the same year. The cooking is what people quote back at each other: Potato and Roe, Lamb Carrot, the Core apple finished with toffee and Somerset cider brandy. Booking it is a separate skill, and the shape of the problem here is unusual enough that most general advice misses it. Here is the honest version as of September 2026.

Where the bookings actually live

CORE takes reservations on OpenTable. The restaurant’s own reservations page carries exactly one booking route, a link through to its OpenTable profile at opentable.co.uk/r/core-by-clare-smyth-london. There is no Resy listing and no SevenRooms widget, so searching those apps is wasted effort. The house also answers the phone on +44 20 3937 5086, and calling is the stated route for a larger party or for a date the online calendar shows as full, which is worth remembering because the widget is not always the whole picture. The advance window is widely reported at 91 days, roughly three months, and the restaurant does not publish a release hour to set an alarm against. Read the edge off the calendar instead: page the OpenTable date picker forward until dates stop being selectable, and that boundary is the live window. It advances a day at a time, so your target date becomes reachable on one specific morning and not before. For the general theory of long windows and why they punish hesitation rather than slow thumbs, see how far in advance you can book a table.

The real constraint is how few services there are

Most guides talk about CORE as though the difficulty were speed. It is closer to arithmetic. The restaurant serves dinner Tuesday to Saturday, 18:30 to 21:45, and lunch on Thursday, Friday and Saturday only, 12:00 to 14:15. Sunday and Monday it does not open at all, and there is no Tuesday or Wednesday lunch. That is eight services a week in one modestly sized Notting Hill dining room, against a room that opens seven days across two services and runs fourteen. Nearly half the week simply does not exist as inventory, which is why the calendar can look emptier than the restaurant’s reputation would suggest. The house also asks that the whole table eats the same way, either from one of the tasting menus or from the a la carte, so a group that cannot agree is a group that should book something else. Party shape matters for the same reason it always does: a table for two is the most common configuration in the room and the one that comes loose most often, while four and above is both rarer and slower to return.

The bar has its own listing, and almost nobody looks

This is the part that is specific to this address and genuinely useful. Whiskey & Seaweed opened inside the same building in October 2023, run by Vincenzo Ciacco, and it is not a holding pen for the dining room. It pours a very deep selection of whiskies from the British Isles and Ireland, cocktails built around them including one that reworks Potato and Roe with butter washed Irish whiskey and seaweed, and a snacks list that reads like CORE in miniature: fried chicken with caviar, a beef and oyster pie, a lobster roll, a caviar sandwich. It keeps the same Tuesday to Saturday rhythm as the restaurant. The booking point is the one that matters here. The bar carries its own separate OpenTable listing, at opentable.co.uk/r/whiskey-and-seaweed-by-clare-smyth-london, distinct from the CORE profile. So when the restaurant calendar is a solid wall of unavailable dates, there is a second calendar at the same address that most people never open, because they search the restaurant name, see nothing, and give up. If your goal this month is to get inside 92 Kensington Park Road and taste what this kitchen is doing, the bar is a real answer rather than a consolation, and it is a fraction of the competition. On the wider question of showing up without a booking at rooms like this, see whether hard restaurants take walk-ins.

Lunch is the cheapest and softest way in

The menus separate along a useful line. The tasting menus are Core Classics at £265 and Core Seasons at £275, with wine pairing at £175 on top of either. The a la carte is £205 at lunch and £235 at dinner, which makes the midday a la carte the least expensive route to the same kitchen by a clear margin. Availability follows price and habit. There are only three lunch services a week and they compete with the working day, so Thursday lunch is consistently the softest slot on the calendar: the first of the three, mid week, and unloved by anyone treating this as an occasion dinner. Saturday lunch is the hardest of the three for the opposite reason. If you are flexible on when rather than whether, ask the 91 day calendar for a Thursday at 12:00 before you ask it for a Saturday at 20:00, because those two requests are not remotely the same problem. For where CORE sits against the rest of the city’s hard rooms, the London hard-tables guide has the full landscape, and Ikoyi is the other end of the spectrum, a whole month released in a single scheduled moment rather than a rolling daily edge.

The 72 hour fee is your cancellation clock

CORE charges £175 per person, for lunch or for dinner, on a booking that is not honoured or is cancelled or reduced in size with less than 72 hours notice. The same fee applies if the dress code is ignored, and the code is written plainly: strictly no sportswear, meaning no tracksuit bottoms and no hooded sweatshirts, with smart trainers accepted. That fee is not just a policy to read and forget. It is the single most useful piece of timing information on the page, because it hands every hesitant booker a deadline. Anyone rethinking a dinner at £275 a head has a strong financial reason to release the table before the 72 hour boundary rather than after it, so the richest window for a returned seat is roughly three to four days ahead of service, not the night before. A thinner second wave arrives on the day itself from people who decide to absorb the fee. The chef’s table follows different rules entirely, with a non-refundable £2,500 deposit and rescheduling allowed only up to fourteen days out, so it almost never comes back into general inventory. Worth knowing too: young guests are welcome if they eat from the regular menu, but the restaurant does not accommodate babies and small children.

Putting a watch on the two calendars

Everything above reduces to being present at two unpredictable moments: the morning your date first becomes reachable at the front edge of the window, and the hour, three or four days out, when somebody releases a table ahead of the fee. Neither is something a person can reliably sit and wait for. SeatSwiper watches the exact CORE booking you want, your date range, service and party size, on OpenTable around the clock, and books it the moment one opens or somebody cancels. It books on your own OpenTable account, in your own name, for your own dinner. Nothing is resold or transferred and there is no queue to buy into. Set it once and leave it alone. 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 date for a cancellation, starting that watch costs $1. Two honest limits worth saying out loud: it works on Resy, SevenRooms and OpenTable only, and it can lose a race for a single table like anyone else, so it is a far better watcher than a human but never a guarantee. It is also worth pointing it at the Whiskey & Seaweed listing as well as the restaurant, since that second calendar is quieter and gets you through the same front door while you wait for the dining room.