When Do Four Kings SF Reservations Open? Noon, 21 Days Out

The direct answer: Four Kings reservations open on OpenTable, 21 days in advance, at 12:00pm noon Pacific time. The Cantonese spot at 710 Commercial Street in San Francisco’s Chinatown books nowhere else, takes no reservations by phone or email, and caps parties at six. The noon time comes from OpenTable’s own blog post about the restaurant, corroborated by The Infatuation, and it is worth stating that plainly because a competing claim floats around: several forum threads and aggregator pages say the book opens at midnight. It does not. Midnight is a real release hour in San Francisco, just at other restaurants. For Four Kings, count 21 days ahead of the night you want, be ready at noon Pacific, and expect the date to sell through within minutes. That is the whole schedule, current as of September 2026, and the full playbook (including the walk-in counter, the best fallback in the city) lives in the companion guide to getting a reservation at Four Kings.

How far in advance can you book Four Kings

Exactly three weeks. The visible OpenTable calendar covers 21 days and no more, so the farthest bookable night is always three weeks from today, and one new date enters the window every day at noon. That makes the date math simple and unforgiving: if you want Friday the 24th, that specific date becomes bookable at 12:00pm Pacific on Friday the 3rd, and not a minute before. Do the count on an actual calendar the night before, because “about three weeks” is how people end up staring at a grayed-out date while the correct one sells out behind them. A 21-day window is short by national standards. New York’s hard books commonly run 14 to 30 days, and the general mechanics of how these windows work across cities and platforms are covered in when restaurant reservations open. What the short window means in practice at Four Kings is that the entire visible book is nearly always sold. There is no shoulder of quiet dates four or five weeks out to plan into. Every bookable night has already had its noon moment.

One more precision point, since time zones trip people up: noon means noon Pacific. If you are booking from the East Coast, that is 3:00pm Eastern. If you are traveling to San Francisco and setting an alarm from another time zone, convert carefully, because arriving 45 seconds late to this particular release is about the same as arriving an hour late.

What happens at the release minute

At 12:00:00 Pacific, the new date flips live for everyone simultaneously, and the crowd that has been sitting on the page hits a small room’s worth of inventory at the same second. Prime slots go first, and two-tops are the most plentiful and therefore the easiest win. Every seat you add past two makes the race harder, and past six the book will not take the party at all. The winning setup is boring and mechanical: signed into OpenTable ahead of time, party size preset, the Four Kings page already open at 11:55, and a decision already made about which seating you will tap. People who win synchronized releases have not found a trick. They have removed every step between the clock striking and the confirmation screen. If you get shut out of prime time, check the late seatings before giving up. Post-9pm slots survive the first wave far more often, and the restaurant’s own 10-seat walk-in counter runs all night as a genuine no-alarm alternative. Where Four Kings sits among the city’s other synchronized sprints, midnight releases included, is mapped in the hardest tables in San Francisco guide.

Cancellations are the second wave

Missing the noon minute does not end the attempt, because the release is only the first of two moments a table can appear. The second is the cancellation. Plans collapse constantly over a three-week horizon, and every collapse puts a table back on the OpenTable page at an hour nobody can predict. Four Kings publishes nothing official about how returned tables are rereleased, so treat the pattern honestly: in San Francisco, where cancellation fees inside 48 hours are common citywide, returns tend to cluster near that two-day deadline as people firm up their week, with a second trickle in the final hours before service. How fee deadlines shape this rhythm across restaurants is covered in restaurant cancellation policies. The catch is visibility. A freed Four Kings table is usually a single two-top reappearing at 11pm on a Tuesday or 2pm on a Thursday, and it is gone again in minutes. Checking the page a few times a day will almost never intersect one of those windows. This wave rewards continuous attention, which is exactly what most people cannot give it.

Set the watch once instead

Both paths reduce to presence: noon Pacific sharp for the release, some random hour for a cancellation. SeatSwiper is built to be that presence. Tell it the dates and party size you want at Four Kings and it watches the OpenTable book around the clock, booking the instant a table appears, whether that is the noon opening 21 days out or a two-top somebody gave back at midnight. It books on your own OpenTable account, in your own name. The first booking is free, then a flat $5 only when it actually lands the table. It can still lose a synchronized race, but it never mistimes a time zone and never stops watching, and against a book this small the cancellation wave is where it earns its keep.