Course Reservations: Booking the Scottsdale Eight-Course Tasting

Course is Cory Oppold’s small restaurant on Shea Boulevard in central Scottsdale, and the name is the format. Oppold, a Food Network Chopped champion who came to cooking after starting out toward architecture, runs dinner Tuesday through Saturday, and on Friday and Saturday adds an eight-course chef’s tasting menu built around whatever the season is doing. The restaurant is explicit that a full experience runs about two and a half hours, offers a ten-minute grace period on reservations, and asks for smart casual dress. All of which tells you it is a small room that plans its evening carefully.

Two restaurants share one calendar

This is the insight that makes Course bookable, and most people miss it. There is a Tuesday-through-Thursday restaurant and a Friday-and-Saturday restaurant, and they are not equally hard. The weekend tasting menu is the destination product, the thing written about and photographed, and it is competing for a small number of seats across two nights a week. The midweek service is the same kitchen, the same room and the same chef, with several times the availability.

Size is what makes that difference bite. The restaurant’s own private-events description, carried on Scottsdale’s official visitor site, puts the dining room at twenty-seven to thirty seats, and the city listings give dinner as 5:00pm to 9:00pm, Tuesday through Saturday. So the weekend tasting is a couple of turns through a room of under thirty covers, on two nights only. It is not the smallest room in the Valley, since Anhelo runs a counter of about sixteen, but it is small enough that a Saturday can vanish weeks out while the same week still has Wednesday tables open.

So the first question is not when to book, it is which restaurant you are actually trying to eat at. If you want the eight courses, treat it like a ticketed event and plan. If you want to eat Oppold’s cooking, a Wednesday will do that beautifully and you can often book it this week. Midweek is not a consolation prize either: the menu moves with the seasons, and a past winter menu the restaurant posted itself opened with a samosa of potato, carrot, yogurt, raisin and mint. It is the same kitchen the eight courses come out of.

Ninety days of book

Course takes reservations on OpenTable, and as of September 2026 its published window runs roughly ninety days on a rolling basis, which means a new date joins the far edge of the calendar as the days advance rather than the whole month arriving at once. Three months is generous by national standards and it is the norm rather than the exception in Scottsdale, where long windows are the local pattern.

Rolling windows reward arithmetic over speed. Take the Saturday you want, subtract ninety days, and that is the morning the date becomes visible. Nobody publishes a release hour for this restaurant, and the booking page simply turns the date on when the calendar advances, so there is no alarm worth setting; there is a day worth checking. The general shape of this is in how far in advance to book.

Where the seats actually are

• Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The single biggest availability difference in this restaurant, and it costs you nothing but a night of the week.
• The early seating. Dinner service starts around 5:00pm and the first slots are consistently the last to fill, especially outside the winter season.
• Two rather than four. A small dining room configures far more two-tops than four-tops, and a party of four on a Saturday is a genuinely different request.
• The summer. Scottsdale demand collapses in July and August. The tasting menu that is unbookable in February is often available in the low season.
• Ninety days out, on the dot. If the date and the tasting menu are both non-negotiable, this is the only reliable route.

The season is the real variable

Scottsdale’s calendar is inverted relative to most American food cities. The hard months are January through March, when the weather is perfect and the Valley fills for golf, the WM Phoenix Open and spring training. A ninety-day window sounds enormous until you realise that booking a February Saturday means acting in November, alongside everyone else planning a winter trip. Conversely, a restaurant like this in August has real midweek availability. The Phoenix and Scottsdale hub covers how that seasonality moves across the whole metro.

Grace periods, deposits and giving a seat back

Course publishes its house rules, and they are unusually relaxed for a weekend tasting menu. Reservations are strongly recommended rather than demanded, there is a ten-minute grace period on arrival, self-parking is on site, and the dress code is smart casual: no jacket required, collared shirts suggested for men. What is absent matters more. Nothing in the published booking notes names a deposit, a prepayment or a no-show fee as of September 2026, and that absence is probably why returned seats appear at all. When cancelling costs a diner nothing, they cancel late, often in the same week as the booking. Hand a seat back through the reservation itself rather than by phone, since that is the version other people can see coming. Cancellation policies vary far more between restaurants than most diners expect.

Two situations the booking page will not solve. A walk-in is a long shot at under thirty seats in a room built around timed menus, though the restaurant’s own hours page notes patio seating, and an outdoor table on a mild weeknight is the likeliest version of it; the wider odds are in do hard restaurants take walk-ins. And a large group is a different transaction entirely, because Course markets the whole room for private gatherings at that same twenty-seven to thirty capacity. A party of eight on a Saturday is better raised with the restaurant directly than hunted on the calendar.

Automating the watch

If what you want is a specific Saturday on the eight-course menu, you have one shot at the ninety-day mark and then a slow trickle of cancellations. SeatSwiper covers both: you set the restaurant, date range and party size, and it watches continuously and books the moment a seat opens, on your own OpenTable account, in your name. Nothing is resold or transferred. The first booking is free, then a flat $5, charged only on a successful booking, with no subscription, and a cancellation watch is $1 to start. It works on Resy, SevenRooms, and OpenTable only, it needs your account connected so it books as you, and on a single returning seat it can lose a race. It is the right tool for a fixed date, and unnecessary if a Wednesday would do.