Four Horsemen Brooklyn Reservations: How to Book

The Four Horsemen is the natural wine restaurant at 295 Grand Street in Williamsburg that LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy opened in 2015 with the late wine consultant Justin Chearno. The New American menu runs to constantly changing small plates, but the wine list is what pulls people across the river. It picked up a Michelin star for the 2020 guide and the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Wine Program award in 2022, unusual attention for a room this small. That is the whole problem in one sentence: national recognition, a tiny dining room, and a cap of five people on anything you can book online. It belongs on any honest list of the hardest restaurants to book in NYC. Here is how booking works, and what to do when it does not.

How booking The Four Horsemen actually works

Reservations run on Resy, and the restaurant publishes its own timing on its reservations page rather than leaving you to guess: all reservations for parties of up to five people open on Resy 30 days in advance at 7 a.m. That hour matters. The standard for hard NYC Resy books is 10 a.m., so plenty of people set the wrong alarm and arrive three hours after the calendar has been picked clean. For the contrast, our explainer on why most NYC Resy releases run at 10 a.m. covers the usual pattern.

The window is rolling, not weekly. A new date enters range every morning at 7, so there is no day of the week to circle. Pick your date, count back 30 days, and be logged in with a card saved before the hour turns. Changes to a booking you already hold go through Resy, and the restaurant states plainly that it takes no reservations by email, so there is no back channel.

Six is the largest party the dining room can take, and six is not bookable on Resy at all. Those go through the group dining form on the restaurant’s own site, which asks for at least 45 days of notice and commits the table to a family style prix fixe at $150 per person before tax, with 20 percent gratuity added and drinks a la carte. Seven or more, the dining room cannot seat you.

Why the table is so hard to get

The room is the constraint. This is a narrow Grand Street space with a bar, a row of window seats, and not much else, serving dinner every day from 5:30 p.m. to 10:45 p.m. and lunch Friday through Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. There is no second floor and no overflow. Whatever the star and the wine list bring in has to fit into a handful of tables.

Here is what that looks like in practice. On 29 August 2026 we checked every single night from 31 August through 28 September, the full 30 day window, for a party of two. Zero open slots on any of them. Nothing, on any night, at any hour. A calendar that uniformly empty tells you something specific: you are not choosing an evening at The Four Horsemen, you are catching one. The five person online cap concentrates every booking into twos and fours, which turn over quickly and vanish just as fast.

One scheduling detail before you set an alarm: the restaurant posts occasional one off closure dates on its contact page, with one listed in early September 2026 as of this writing. Check it before you count back 30 days.

The walk-in and off-peak angles

This is the part worth knowing. The Four Horsemen keeps a real walk-in policy and publishes the mechanics, which most rooms at this level do not:

• The bar and window seats are walk-in. They are held first come, first served, and every member of your party has to be physically present before you can be seated. No sending one person ahead to hold ground. More on the general tactic in how walk-ins work at hard tables.
• Join the line before the doors open. For weekday dinner and weekend lunch, people queue up outside before service starts. The host team seats reservations first, then works through walk-ins gradually, so position in that line is the whole game.
• Use the afternoon gap. On lunch days the kitchen closes at 3:30 p.m. but the restaurant stays open between services for drinks, and bar seats can free up in that transition. Once they fill, a walk-in waitlist starts at 4:45 p.m., which is the single most concrete arrival time on this page.
• Go late. Walk-ins are accepted until 15 minutes before the kitchen closes, and dinner runs to 10:45 p.m., so showing up around 10 p.m. is a legitimate plan rather than a long shot.
• Take lunch instead of dinner. Friday through Sunday, 11:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., same kitchen and same wine list, against a fraction of the competition for a booked table.
• Book two, not four. A two top clears and reopens far more often in a room this size, and a returned pair of seats is the most common thing you will see come back.

When cancelled tables come back

Cancellations are the other door, and at a restaurant with a permanently empty calendar they are the main one. Resy puts a returned table back into inventory the moment a guest gives it up, so a night that showed nothing for four weeks can quietly produce a two top with a day’s notice. The densest window is the 24 to 48 hours before service, when people firm up their week and release what they will not use, with a thinner trickle on the day itself.

Understanding how restaurant cancellation policies work tells you roughly when seats come loose. The catch is severity rather than novelty. Because the room is so small, a returned table is often the only opening a date will ever produce, and it can be gone in under a minute to whoever happens to be refreshing. Nobody can sit on a Resy page for four weeks waiting for that.

Automating the watch

That last mile is exactly what SeatSwiper is built for. You give it the Four Horsemen date range and party size you want, and it watches around the clock, then books the moment a seat opens, whether that is new availability at the 7 a.m. mark 30 days out or somebody cancelling the night before. It books on your own Resy account, in your name, an ordinary reservation you walk in and use, nothing resold or transferred. Pricing is plain: your first booking is free, then a flat $5 only when it actually gets you the table, with no subscription, and starting a cancellation watch on a returned seat costs $1 to begin. The honest limits are worth saying out loud too. It works on Resy, SevenRooms, and OpenTable only, it needs your reservation account connected so it can book as you, and it can lose a race for a single seat when demand spikes. It is a far better watcher than any human with a refresh button, but it is not a guarantee. If you are planning a Williamsburg night, line up the same watch a few blocks away at Lilia, which runs a 28 day Resy window at 10 a.m. and fills just as completely.