Ha’s Snack Bar Reservations: How to Get a Table (NYC)

Ha’s Snack Bar is a small counter restaurant at 297 Broome St, on the corner of Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side, run by chefs and owners Anthony Ha and Sadie Mae Burns. The two cooked as the Ha’s Đặc Biệt pop-up before they had a room of their own, and they opened this one in January 2025. The food is French bistro cooking pulled toward Vietnam, poured alongside natural wine, and the menu is a chalkboard that changes daily, so the dish you read about may not be on it the night you go. The press keeps coming back to the same plates: snails in garlic-tamarind butter, oysters with green chili, chicken liver pâté, a sweetbread vol au vent, curried lobster and an onion soup. Getting one of its few seats is the hard part. This guide covers how the book works as of October 2026, what the restaurant itself says, where the third-party sources disagree, and the ways in that do not depend on being quick at noon.

Why a small room on Broome Street is this hard

The attention arrived fast. Bon Appétit named Ha’s Snack Bar one of its 20 Best New Restaurants of 2025, and Time Out, reporting the list on September 15, 2025, noted it was the only New York pick. In January 2026 it landed on the James Beard semifinalist list for Best Chef: New York State, per Time Out on January 21. Five days later The Infatuation published Molly Fitzpatrick’s review, which scored it 9.2. That run of attention, aimed at a room this size, is why Resy’s own list of the toughest reservations in town, updated September 10, 2026, includes it. The wider field it now sits in is mapped in the hardest restaurants to book in NYC guide.

No website, so here is what the restaurant itself says

Ha’s Snack Bar has no website. The obvious address, hassnackbar.com, does not resolve, and nothing else stands in for it. That leaves exactly two first-party sources, and everything else you read about the restaurant, this guide included, is someone reporting from outside. The first is its Resy page. The second is the owners’ Instagram, @has_dac_biet, whose bio reads, in full: “Ha’s Snack Bar @ 297 Broome St M-SAT / Bistrot Ha @ 137 Eldridge St T-SAT / *everything contains fish sauce”. The account was still posting into October 2026 and the Resy page is live, which is about as much confirmation that the place is open as you get without walking past it. If fish is an allergy for you rather than a preference, take the last line of that bio at its word.

The Need to Know section on the Resy page is the other piece of the restaurant’s own wording, quoted exactly: “Walk-ins welcomed. Due to the small space parties of 2-3 will have 1.5 hours to dine & parties of 4 or more have 2 hours to dine!” Between that sentence and the Instagram bio you have the address, the days, the walk-in policy and the table limits straight from the people who run it. The booking window, the opening hour and the walk-in timing below all come from third parties, and they are labelled that way.

How the Resy book works

Reservations are on Resy and nowhere else. Bon Appétit, as reported by Time Out in September 2025, put it as “reservations through Resy only”, and with no website there is no second widget or booking form to hunt for. On the window, the sources nearly agree. Resy’s toughest-reservations list, updated September 10, 2026, says: “Three weeks in advance at noon.” The Infatuation, writing on September 16, 2026, said tables open “around three weeks out”. One reservation tracker puts it at 20 days at noon, a day shorter than Resy’s phrasing. A one-day gap sounds trivial until you set an alarm for the wrong morning, so check it yourself: open the Resy page, scroll the calendar forward until the dates stop being bookable, and count the days to the last open one. Look once just before noon New York time and once just after, and you will see whether a new date appears at that hour.

Dinner starts at 5:30pm, according to Resy’s blog. The days are less settled. The owners’ Instagram says Monday to Saturday (“M-SAT”), while several listing aggregators say Tuesday to Saturday. The owners are the better source, and a Monday would be the easiest night of the week to want, but look at a Monday on the Resy calendar before you plan around one. The restaurant does not publish a closing time, so do not count on a late seating you have not actually seen offered.

Bistrot Ha is a separate restaurant

The same Instagram bio lists a second address. Bistrot Ha, at 137 Eldridge St, is a newer and separate restaurant from the same owners, and it has its own Resy listing. With names this close and both addresses on or at Eldridge Street, it is easy to set an alert on the wrong one, or to book Bistrot Ha thinking you have landed the snack bar. Before you set a Notify alert or a noon alarm, make sure the listing says Ha’s Snack Bar at 297 Broome. That said, Bistrot Ha is worth a dinner in its own right, and the bio has its nights as Tuesday to Saturday. Treat it as its own book with its own calendar, and check it separately.

A table for two is the realistic target

Bon Appétit described counter seating, and a write-up on Islands puts the room at about 24 seats. Even if that count is off by a few, the arithmetic is unkind to groups. A table for four would be a sixth of a 24-seat room on its own, and the restaurant gives parties of four or more two hours against 1.5 for two or three, so a four-top both takes more of the room and turns over less often. If you can make it a dinner for two, do. Two people fit at a counter, take the shorter slot, and can split the searching across two phones and two Resy accounts. If you are planning for a larger group, check the party-size selector on the Resy page before you promise anyone a date.

The 1.5-hour clock works in your favor

The time limit is the line most people skim past, and it helps you. A pair seated at 5:30pm is due to give the seats back around 7pm, which means the same stools come up more than once across a night instead of being held by one couple until close. More turns mean more bookable slots per seat than in a room where people linger, and it makes a later time a real option rather than leftovers. If the 7pm is gone a minute after noon, look further down the evening before you give up on the date. Cancellations work the same way: because the slots are short and there are several per seat, one couple backing out frees a specific window that can reappear on the calendar at any hour before the date. Arrive on time, too. With a fixed clock, a late start comes out of your own dinner.

Walking in, and the 4:45pm sidewalk

The Resy page says walk-ins are welcomed, and Resy’s toughest-reservations list agrees, with the advice to “get there early”. The Infatuation is more specific: be outside by 4:45pm if you want the first seating at the bar. With dinner starting at 5:30pm, that is three quarters of an hour on Broome Street before anyone sits down, and it is the one route in that does not involve Resy at all. It is mostly a weeknight route. A Tuesday line is usually shorter than a Friday one, and one or two people are far easier to seat at a counter than a group arriving together. If you miss the first wave, the 1.5-hour limit helps again, since seats come free as the early tables finish, so arriving later is not a lost cause, just a longer wait. The general case for which hard rooms keep a door open is in do hard restaurants take walk-ins, and the city list is NYC hard restaurants that take walk-ins.

When tables come back

A cancelled table at Ha’s Snack Bar goes back into the same Resy book and reappears on the calendar for whoever is looking at that moment. It is not held for anyone. Resy’s Notify feature will tell you when your date opens up, but it tells everyone who set the same alert at once, and a two-top in a small room goes to whoever confirms first, which is why so many people say Notify never works for them (the mechanics are in why Resy Notify rarely works). As at most hard rooms, returns tend to bunch in the last day or two before a date, when plans firm up, with a trickle at no particular hour before that. Checking the app twice a day catches very little of it. And if your night slips away entirely, The Four Horsemen in Williamsburg is another natural-wine room with its own guide.

Putting a watch on the Resy book

Every way into Ha’s Snack Bar apart from the 4:45pm sidewalk comes down to being on the Resy page in the instant a table exists: noon on the day your date comes into the window, or the unscheduled minute when someone gives back a 1.5-hour two-top. That is a job for software rather than a person refreshing between meetings. SeatSwiper watches Resy, SevenRooms and OpenTable, and Ha’s Snack Bar is on Resy, so you give it your dates and party size, set it once, and it keeps watching and books the table the moment one opens or someone cancels. It books on your own Resy account, in your name, for your own dinner, and nothing is resold or transferred. The first booking is free. After that it is a flat $5, charged only when it actually books the table, with no subscription. A cancellation watch on a date that is already sold out costs $1 to start, charged when the watch begins even if no table ever opens; that $1 is not covered by the free first booking and is not refunded, and the same $5 applies if the watch wins you the table. The honest limits: it only works on those three platforms, it needs your Resy login to book in your name, and it can lose a race for a single table, which in a room this small is a real possibility. It cannot stand in the walk-in line for you either. Point it at the Ha’s Snack Bar listing rather than Bistrot Ha, and if nothing has landed by the week of your dinner, the 4:45pm line on Broome Street is still there.