How to Get a Reservation at Funke in Beverly Hills

Funke is Evan Funke’s three-story Beverly Hills flagship at 9388 South Santa Monica Boulevard, a restored 1930s Art Deco building given over almost entirely to handmade pasta. Chef Funke already ran two of LA’s hardest tables at Felix and Mother Wolf, and many regulars now call Funke the toughest of the three. Behind the host stand sits a glassed-in pasta room where the dough is rolled in full view, while the main dining room runs to semi-circle booths under hanging glass bulbs. Prime-time seats are finite, and the Friday waitlist can climb past a thousand names.

How booking Funke works

Funke takes reservations on Resy, and the timing is the first thing to understand. The book opens a rolling 7 days in advance of your desired date, at 9am Pacific, for parties of 8 or fewer. There is no separate 30-day or 60-day window here, so the entire week’s demand lands on a single morning. For 9 or more guests, private dining, or events, the restaurant asks you to email events@funkela.com rather than book online.

There is no prepaid deposit for a standard table, but Funke charges a $50 per guest fee for no-shows in the dining room, and it asks that any change or cancellation be made at least 24 hours ahead through Resy. If you already know your date, the move is simple: be logged in and ready the instant the clock hits 9am Pacific, exactly seven days out. For the full mechanics of timed releases, see when reservations open.

Why the Funke table is so hard

Evan Funke built a devoted following at Felix in Venice and Mother Wolf in Hollywood before opening this place, and that audience showed up on day one. Add a Michelin listing, a compact dinner-only service from 5pm to 10:30 or 11pm, and a dining room that seats a fixed number each night, and the math turns brutal fast. The 6:30 to 8:30 prime-time slots are gone within seconds of the 9am open, and peak-night waitlists have topped a thousand people.

The short 7-day window is the real squeeze. Venues that open a month or two out spread their demand across weeks, but Funke concentrates it into one 9am moment, so you are competing with everyone who wants that same Saturday, all at once. It sits near the top of our hardest restaurants to book in Los Angeles list, alongside the chef’s own Mother Wolf.

Back-door ways in

If the dining room will not cooperate, Funke is unusually generous with no-reservation and off-peak routes. Work through these before you give up on a date:

• Walk in to the restaurant bar. The ground-floor bar seats walk-in guests and serves the full menu, so an early weeknight arrival can get you the pasta with no reservation at all.
• Try Bar Funke on the roof. The open-air rooftop runs first-come, first-serve and carries its own separate listing on Resy, often looser than the main room. It pours a Firenze Negroni riff and plates 68-day-aged beef carpaccio, sfincione, and crudo.
• Book a Monday through Thursday. Weeknights clear far more easily than Friday or Saturday, and the room and menu are identical.
• Take a 5pm or a late seating. When the 6:30 to 8:30 block is gone, the early and late edges of service often still show open tables.
• Set Resy Notify for your date and party size so the app pings you if a table opens. See our note on whether hard restaurants take walk-ins.

When cancelled tables come back

Because Funke asks for changes at least 24 hours ahead, many returned tables surface roughly a day before service, when people firm up their plans and give back what they cannot use. A second wave shows up at service time itself: Funke holds a table for 15 minutes past the reservation, then releases no-shows to the standby list. Both are genuine openings for a seat that looked fully booked an hour earlier.

The catch is that these tables reappear at no fixed time, and a returned prime-time seat at a restaurant this popular can be claimed in the time it takes to notice the notification. Understanding the venue’s cancellation policy tells you roughly when to look. It does not make the looking any less relentless.

Automating the watch

Refreshing Resy at 9am seven days out, then again every time someone might cancel, is a lot to ask of anyone with a job and a life. That is the part SeatSwiper handles for you. You tell it the Funke table you actually want, your date range and party size, and it watches around the clock and books the seat the moment one opens, whether that is brand-new availability at the 9am window or a table someone gives back the night before. It books on your own Resy account, in your name, with nothing resold. Your first booking is free, then it is a flat $5 only when it actually lands you the table, with no subscription. Starting a cancellation watch on a returned seat costs $1 to begin. Be honest about the limits, though: SeatSwiper works on Resy, SevenRooms, and OpenTable only, it needs your reservation account connected, and it can lose a race for a single seat when several people want the same one at once. It is a far better watcher than any human staring at the app, but it is never a guarantee.