When Do Kasama Reservations Open? Noon, Six Weeks Out

Kasama books dinner on OpenTable, and unlike most restaurants at this level it publishes its own release rule rather than leaving you to reverse engineer one. The wording on the restaurant’s reservations page, as of September 2026, is that tables for parties of up to 6 people are released on a 6 week rolling calendar at 12pm CST. Translated into something you can set an alarm by: noon Chicago time, six weeks (42 days) before the night you want to eat. Because the calendar rolls rather than dropping in monthly batches, exactly one fresh date enters range each day, so any given Saturday has one noon in its entire existence when it first becomes clickable. Two caveats worth stating honestly. The restaurant writes CST year round, while Chicago actually sits on Central Daylight Time from March to November, so the safe reading is simply local Chicago noon rather than a fixed offset from UTC. And the daytime side of the business has no release time at all, because it takes no bookings in the first place. Everything below assumes you want the Filipino tasting menu, currently $325 per person, which is the only thing the evening serves. The full venue playbook, including the walk up counter and the room itself, lives in our guide to getting a reservation at Kasama.

How far in advance can you book Kasama?

Six weeks, and not a day more. That ceiling is firm in a way people often misread. A rolling calendar does not mean six weeks of dates all sitting there waiting for you to pick one, and it does not mean you can quietly reach further out by trying a direct link or calling. The date at the far edge of the window is the only new inventory in play on any given day, and everything nearer than that edge has already been picked over by everyone who got there first. So if you are planning a birthday in late November, the only question that matters is which day in mid October sits exactly 42 days earlier. Count backwards on a calendar, put the alarm at 11:55am Chicago time on that day, and treat the weeks of browsing before then as informational rather than hopeful. If you are new to the difference between a timed release like this and the quieter windows other restaurants use, the general mechanics are laid out in when restaurant reservations open. The party size ceiling matters here too: the calendar simply stops at six, so a group of eight is not a harder version of this problem, it is a different problem, and the answer is an email to the restaurant rather than a faster trigger finger.

What happens at the release minute

Noon arrives and the new date goes live for everybody at once, which is the part worth picturing before you experience it. Kasama is a small storefront in Ukrainian Village running a tasting menu four nights a week, Thursday through Sunday. A tasting menu turns each table once per evening rather than twice or three times, so the number of seats that exist for a single Saturday is genuinely small, small enough that the whole night can be claimed inside the first minute. The people competing for those seats are not casual browsers either. A $325 menu at the first Filipino restaurant to hold a Michelin star attracts people who have been planning the trip for months, which means the crowd hitting refresh at 11:59 is unusually prepared.

Preparation is therefore most of what you control. Be signed into OpenTable already, with your card and phone number saved to the account, and decide your party size and your acceptable time range before noon rather than while the seats are disappearing. Have a second and third choice of time ready, because the difference between booking and not booking is usually whether you hesitated over a 5:30 or a 9pm. Thursday and Sunday face noticeably less pressure than Friday and Saturday for an identical menu, and a two top fits into more gaps than a four or a six. If the screen tells you nothing is available within a few seconds, believe it and switch plans, because at this scale there is no long tail of stragglers still trickling in. Where Kasama sits relative to the rest of the city’s difficult rooms is mapped in the hardest restaurants to book in Chicago.

Cancellations are the second wave

Missing the release minute is not the end of the date, it just moves you into the slower and less crowded half of the game. Seats come back, and at Kasama they come back on a schedule you can actually anticipate, because the restaurant’s cancellation terms shape the behavior. Cancelling within 48 hours of the reservation costs $325 per guest, and reducing your guest count inside that same 48 hours adds $325 for every guest you drop. A penalty that large does not stop people from cancelling, it changes when they cancel. Nobody with a party of four gives up a Saturday at 3pm on Friday if doing so costs thirteen hundred dollars. They decide before the deadline instead.

That pushes the richest return window to roughly two to three days out, just ahead of the line where the charge begins, which is meaningfully earlier than the day before or morning of pattern that works at restaurants with no deposit and no fee. Seats do still surface inside the 48 hours, when illness or a cancelled flight makes someone eat the charge, and those are both the rarest and the fastest to vanish. The broader logic of reading a fee structure to predict when tables reappear is covered in restaurant cancellation policies. The catch is timing rather than luck. A returned Kasama seat can be visible on OpenTable at 4:40pm on a Tuesday for under a minute, and no reasonable person is watching a reservation page at that moment, three afternoons in a row, on the chance one appears.

Set it up once and let something else watch

Both openings at Kasama, the noon release 42 days out and the unpredictable return two to three days before service, ask the same thing of you: be looking at the exact second a seat exists. An alarm handles the first one reasonably well. Nothing handles the second one except software, which is why SeatSwiper exists. You name the date range and party size you want, and it watches the OpenTable listing around the clock, booking on your own account, in your own name, the moment something opens. The first booking is free, then a flat $5 charged only when it actually lands you a table, and how SeatSwiper works covers the mechanics and the limits, including the obvious one: a watcher can lose a race for a single seat just like a person can, it simply never gets bored or goes to sleep. Whichever way you play it, the honest summary for this restaurant is short. Noon Chicago time, six weeks ahead, six guests maximum, four nights a week, one menu. Everything else is patience.