Monkey Bar NYC Reservations: 21 Days Out at 9am on Resy

Monkey Bar is at 60 E 54th St in Midtown East, in the Hotel Elysée building, and it is run by Hogsalt, Brendan Sodikoff’s group, which also runs 4 Charles Prime Rib in the West Village and Au Cheval in Chicago. The food is American, steaks and pastas and a burger: a double cheeseburger listed at $29.99, vodka rigatoni at $34.99, a truffle monkey bread at $34.99, a wedge at $27.99, a 16oz dry-aged New York strip at $94.99 and a lemon meringue pie at $20.99 (prices as listed in October 2026, and menus move). The Infatuation scored it 8.5 out of 10 in its January 13, 2023 review, under the line “At nearly 100 years old, Monkey Bar has never been better.” It is not a stars-and-tasting-menu room, and the calendar fills anyway. This guide covers how its reservation book works as of October 2026, in the restaurant’s own words where it has given them, and the ways in that do not depend on a 9am alarm.

First, it is open

If you searched for Monkey Bar and hit a dead page, that was the old domain. monkeybarnewyork.com no longer works (its hosting is suspended), but plenty of older articles, listings and reservation trackers still link to it, and a broken website is easy to read as a closed restaurant. The real site is nycmonkeybar.com, with a footer that reads “©2026 Hogsalt”. The building adds a second source of doubt: the Hotel Elysée itself is being renovated, and the hotel’s own site says “Coming Fall 2026”. The bar is not waiting for it. As of October 2026 Monkey Bar is open and taking bookings, and when we checked its live Resy page on October 3 it read “The next availability for 2 is Tue., Oct. 13”. Nothing else about how the hotel work touches the restaurant has been published, so treat the renovation as the hotel’s business and the bar as open.

How the book works: 21 days out, 9am

Monkey Bar books on Resy, and unlike a lot of restaurants it publishes its window in writing. Its reservations page says: “Reservations are available up to 21 days in advance with each new date becoming available at 9 AM EST.” The Resy listing says the same thing in its own words: “Monkey Bar accepts reservations up to 21 days in advance, with each new day becoming available at 9 AM.” At least one third-party reservation tracker lists the window as 20 days. The restaurant and Resy agree on 21, and they are the ones setting it, so plan on 21.

In practice the calendar rolls forward one date every morning. A Saturday becomes bookable at 9am on the Saturday three weeks before it: by that rule, Saturday, October 24 came onto the book at 9am on Saturday, October 3. A Tuesday opens on the Tuesday three weeks earlier, and so on through the week. The venue writes “EST” and Resy just says 9 AM; the restaurant is in Manhattan, so set the alarm for 9am New York time and be signed in to Resy, card saved, a few minutes before. To confirm the count yourself, open the Resy page and scroll forward until the dates gray out. The last bookable date should sit 21 days from today, and if you look once just before 9am and once just after, you can watch the next one appear.

The October 3 reading shows what three weeks of dates on sale looks like in practice: the first open table for two was ten days away, on Tuesday, October 13, so for the nine days before that, nothing for two was showing at all. That is one day’s snapshot rather than a rule, but it is a fair warning that trying the main book for this coming Friday is the hard way to eat here.

The house rules for a booking

The reservations page sets out its terms plainly. “We are an intimate restaurant and accept reservations for parties of up to 8 guests.” And: “A $2.50 per person reservation fee will be added to all online reservations to secure your seats. Holiday booking fees may vary. We do not charge a reservation fee for walk-in guests.” So a table for four booked on Resy carries $10 in fees on top of the bill, and a holiday date may cost more. The restaurant asks for one reservation per group, made at your real party size, and the Resy listing adds that the count should include children and that there are no high chairs. If you are more than eight, the online book is not your route. The restaurant does host private events (it closes dinner for them on set nights), so a larger group should contact it directly rather than trying to split across two tables.

What the $2.50 fee does to cancellations

A small per-person fee will not stop anyone set on eating here, but it changes the arithmetic of holding a table you might not use. A free reservation costs nothing to sit on, so people grab a 9am slot on a whim, or keep two dates while they decide. At $2.50 a head, a speculative hold for four costs $10 for nothing. The likely result is fewer casual holds and fewer no-shows, and that cuts both ways for you. There may be fewer tables coming back, but the ones that do come back are deliberate cancellations, from someone whose plans actually changed, and they return to the same Resy calendar they came from, visible to whoever is looking at that moment. The pages we checked do not say whether the fee comes back if you cancel, so read the terms on the Resy booking screen before you confirm.

The bar is the walk-in door

Monkey Bar’s own answer to a full book is on the same page: “We welcome walk-ins to join us at the bar where we serve the full menu.” That matters more here than at most restaurants, because the bar keeps long hours. It opens at 11:45am every day and runs until 11pm Tuesday to Saturday and 10:30pm on Sunday and Monday. There is no reservation fee for walk-ins, and the full menu means the cheeseburger and the monkey bread come to you whether you booked three weeks ago or walked in off 54th Street.

The realistic same-day play is the afternoon. Lunch ends at 2:30pm and dinner does not start until 5pm, and the bar stays open straight through that gap. A 3pm or 4pm bar seat on a weekday means beating far fewer people than a stool at 7:30pm on a Friday does. A late weekday lunch is the other version of the same idea, at the bar or on the Resy calendar, since lunch runs Monday to Friday. Either way this works best for one or two; a bar is built for pairs, not for five friends arriving together. The general case for which hard rooms keep a real door open is in do hard restaurants take walk-ins.

Lunch, brunch and the less contested hours

At most hard rooms the demand is overwhelmingly for dinner, which leaves the daytime book quieter. Monkey Bar serves lunch Monday to Friday, 11:45am to 2:30pm, and brunch on Saturday and Sunday over the same hours. When you open the Resy calendar for your date, look at the midday times before you give up on it. A weekday lunch takes out everyone who cannot leave a desk for two hours, and weekend brunch is booked by a different crowd from the one chasing a Saturday 8pm. Dinner runs 5pm to 10:30pm Tuesday to Saturday and 5pm to 10pm on Sunday and Monday. The two ends of that range, a 5pm or a table near close, tend to outlast the 7:30pm, and a Sunday or Monday dinner is a softer target than the end of the week.

Breakfast, new from October 12

There is a new way into the room this month. The homepage says: “We will be open for breakfast daily beginning October 12.” The about page gives the hour: “We will be open for breakfast daily at 7am beginning Monday, October 12th.” A service that has not started yet has no track record, so nobody can tell you how hard a breakfast table will be, and this guide won’t guess. What can be said is that it adds a seating to the day that nobody has built a habit around yet, at a restaurant whose evenings are spoken for. The pages we checked do not say whether breakfast is booked on Resy or taken as walk-ins, so look at the Resy calendar for dates from October 12 onward and see whether morning times appear.

Nights the dining room is closed

Before you set an alarm, read the notices on the Resy page. As of October 2026 it says: “We will be closed during dinner for private events on 10/3, 10/17, and 11/4.” That is Saturday, October 3, Saturday, October 17 and Wednesday, November 4. If one of those is your date, there is no dinner table to win, and no amount of 9am effort changes that. The notice mentions dinner only, so if the day matters, check the calendar for lunch times rather than assuming the whole day is off. Private events are the restaurant’s to schedule and more can be added, so read the notice again whenever you start on a new date.

Where cancellations show up

A cancelled Monkey Bar table goes back into the Resy book and reappears on the calendar for everyone looking at that date at once. Resy’s Notify will tell you when your date opens up, but it tells everyone who set the same alert, and the table goes to whoever confirms first (why that race is usually lost by a person with a phone is in why Resy Notify rarely works). Every booking here is made at most three weeks before the date, and plans firm up or fall apart in the last few days, so returns tend to bunch close to the date, with a trickle at no particular hour in between. Checking the app over coffee and again after work catches very little of that. For where Monkey Bar sits against the rest of the city’s difficult tables, see the hardest restaurants to book in NYC.

Putting a watch on Monkey Bar’s Resy book

Apart from walking up to the bar, every route above ends in the same place: being on the Resy page in the instant a table exists, whether that is 9am three weeks out or the unscheduled minute someone gives back a Thursday. That is a job for software rather than a thumb on a refresh button. SeatSwiper watches Resy, SevenRooms and OpenTable, and Monkey Bar is on Resy, so you give it your date, your time range and your party size, set it once, and it keeps watching and books the table the moment one opens or someone cancels. It books one table at your real party size, on your own Resy account and in your name, for your own dinner; 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 full 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. Monkey Bar’s own $2.50 per person Resy fee still applies on top, since that is the restaurant’s charge. 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, so it beats refreshing by hand without being a guarantee. It cannot hold you a bar stool either. If nothing has landed by the week of your dinner, the bar opens at 11:45am.