How to Get a Reservation at Elske (Chicago)

Elske is the Michelin one-star, Danish-influenced restaurant that David and Anna Posey opened on West Randolph Street in 2016, in the stretch of the West Loop where Chicago’s hardest tables cluster. The name comes from the Danish word for love, a nod to David’s Danish heritage and the couple’s engagement in Copenhagen, and the room reads that way: a spare, light Scandinavian dining space that opens onto a reclaimed-brick courtyard with a fireplace and an edible garden. It seats a small crowd, it has held its star every year since 2017, and prime weekend times book out well before most people think to look. Here is how to actually get in, starting with where the reservation lives.

Booking Elske starts on OpenTable

Elske takes its reservations on OpenTable, not Resy, and getting the platform right is the first move, because older guides and a leftover third-party listing can still send people elsewhere. OpenTable is the platform Elske itself points you to. Book directly on the OpenTable app or website, where the counter-style bar seats are listed right alongside the dining-room tables.

There is no prepaid ticket and no per-seat deposit to reserve. You choose your date, time, and party size and hold the table. When you arrive, the whole party commits to one format for everyone: either the set tasting menu, recently around $140, or the a la carte menu served family-style. A 4 percent surcharge is added to every check, and the staff will remove it if you ask.

Elske releases its calendar on a rolling window, so new dates become bookable as the days roll forward. The practical move is to book the moment your target date enters that window rather than hoping a prime Friday is still sitting there a few days out. If you are new to how these windows behave, read when restaurant reservations open.

Why an Elske table is hard to get

The math is simple and unforgiving. The dining room is small, the patio adds only a handful of coveted warm-weather seats, and the Poseys run one unhurried seating philosophy rather than churning tables, so the supply of prime slots is thin to begin with. Layer on years of Michelin recognition, a national reputation for Anna Posey’s desserts, and a West Loop address surrounded by other trophy reservations, and weekend 7 to 8 p.m. windows get claimed almost as soon as they appear.

The courtyard is the scarcest inventory of all once the weather turns, because it is a small brick garden rather than a sprawling terrace. None of this makes the table impossible. It means the easy slots are gone, and you have to be smarter about the ones most people overlook. For the wider picture, browse the hardest restaurants to book in Chicago.

The easier doors most people skip

Most people only try the one thing everyone tries, a two-top at 7:30 on Saturday. Elske quietly leaves several easier doors open:

• Walk in and sit at the bar. Elske welcomes walk-ins when there is room and holds no tables aside for them, so an early or off-peak arrival at the counter is a genuine path in. Both the tasting menu and the a la carte menu are served at the bar, so you are not settling for a lesser meal. More on this in do hard restaurants take walk-ins.
• Go a la carte at the counter. The family-style a la carte format tends to have more give than the full tasting commitment, and counter seats often open when a dining-room table will not.
• Take a weeknight or an early seating. An early 5:30 or 6 p.m. seat on a quieter weeknight is a different world from a Saturday prime time, and those slots sit unclaimed far longer. Check the current schedule on OpenTable, since the open days shift seasonally.
• Call the day of. Because no tables are held for walk-ins, a quick call to check the night’s capacity at (312) 733-1314 can tell you whether a counter seat is worth the trip.
• Hunt the patio on its own. Courtyard seats are seasonal and few, so treat them as a separate search and book them the instant they appear rather than waiting on a dining-room table to free up.

When cancelled tables come back

The other way in is patience with other people’s plans. Elske’s inventory turns over constantly in the days before a service as parties cancel or trim their reservations, and every returned seat goes straight back into OpenTable for the next person to claim.

The catch is timing. Those tables can reappear at any hour and get taken within minutes, so whoever is looking at the right second wins them. Watch the 24-to-48-hour window before your target date most closely, when cancellations cluster as plans firm up, and keep checking right after any weather shift for the patio. For how cancellation timing tends to work, see restaurant cancellation policies. If you have struck out on Elske entirely, a sibling West Loop table like Girl and the Goat runs on similar dynamics.

The trouble with watching it yourself

You can absolutely land Elske by hand. The problem is that the winning move, being the one person looking at OpenTable in the exact minute a Friday patio seat reopens, is not something a working human can sustain across a two-week search. You cannot refresh all day, and the good returns never announce themselves. That is the gap worth closing, and it is exactly what an automated watch is for.

Automating the watch

SeatSwiper closes that gap. It watches the exact Elske table you want, your date range, your party size, whether it is a dining-room two-top or a seasonal patio seat, around the clock, and books it the moment one becomes available, whether that is newly released inventory or a cancellation someone just let go. It books on your own OpenTable account, in your name, at the normal price, with nothing resold or marked up. Your first booking is free, and after that it is a flat $5 charged only when it actually gets you the table, with no subscription. Be clear on the limits, because they are real: SeatSwiper works on OpenTable, Resy, and SevenRooms only, it needs your reservation account connected to book for you, and for a single seat that dozens of people also want it can lose the race. It is a far more patient and faster watcher than any person, but it is never a guarantee. For the Elske table you keep missing, that is the difference between hoping and getting the notification that you are in.