When Do Restaurant Reservations Open? Opening Times for the Hardest Tables

There is no single time that restaurant reservations open. The honest answer is that each restaurant sets its own window and its own hour, and the whole game of landing a hard table starts with knowing that number for the specific room you want. This is the reference: how the three platforms release tables, the two shapes a booking window takes, and the reported opening times for a set of famously hard rooms, with links to the deeper guide for each. Everything here is as of August 2026, and because a venue can change its window with no announcement, the last step is always to confirm the exact minute on the restaurant's own booking page.

Two ways a book opens

Almost every reservation window is one of two shapes. A rolling window opens one new date every day at the far edge of a fixed number of days: if the window is 14 days and it refreshes at 9am, then at 9am today the date two weeks out becomes bookable, and tomorrow at 9am the next day does. You get a daily rhythm and a smaller crowd per opening. A synchronized release drops a whole block of dates at once on a set schedule, like all of next month appearing on the 1st, so there is a single date and time everyone aims at and far more competition in that instant. The mechanics of that scramble are in why hard tables vanish in seconds, and the fixed-time version is broken down in when Resy reservations open.

What each platform tends to do

The platform shapes the timing, though the restaurant always has the final say. A fuller comparison lives in Resy vs SevenRooms vs OpenTable.

• Resy leans on the synchronized opening: a restaurant opens dates a fixed number of days ahead at a fixed time, with 10am Eastern the common New York default and windows usually somewhere between two weeks and a month. The exact figures are stated on the venue's Resy page.
• OpenTable more often runs a rolling window, a new day becoming bookable as the calendar advances rather than in one synchronized morning. The hour varies more widely here, anywhere from midnight to noon depending on the room, so it is the platform where confirming the minute matters most.
• SevenRooms powers the restaurant's own booking page rather than a central marketplace, so when tables open is whatever the venue configured, and there is no shared feed to watch. Demand is spread out, which means patient checking pays off more here than anywhere.
• Tock skews to prepaid, ticketed tasting menus with batch releases, and it is worth knowing it exists, but it sits outside the three platforms this site and SeatSwiper work with.

Reported opening times at hard tables

A venue-by-venue reference for rooms people fight over, with the reported window and hour. Treat every one as a starting point to verify on the venue's page, not a promise, because these are the numbers most likely to quietly change.

• Carbone (NYC, Resy): roughly a month ahead at a fixed morning hour, both stated on its Resy page; prime slots are typically gone in single-digit seconds.
• Torrisi (NYC, Resy): a rolling 30-day window, most guides putting the opening at 10am Eastern with a few reporting 9am, plus a booking deposit applied to your bill.
• Don Angie (NYC, OpenTable): about 7 days out at 9am Eastern, refreshed daily. It moved off Resy to OpenTable around 2025, so old advice pointing at Resy is stale.
• Kabawa (NYC, OpenTable): about 14 days ahead, refreshed daily, with the new date reported to appear around midnight Eastern, a figure from booking write-ups rather than a dated policy page.
• Una Pizza Napoletana (NYC, OpenTable): two weeks in advance at 9am Eastern, one date at a time. Note the 9am rather than the more familiar 10am.
• Bavette's (Chicago, Resy): 21 days in advance on a rolling basis, each new date opening at 9am Central.
• Four Kings (SF, OpenTable): three weeks ahead at noon Pacific. Forum posts claim midnight; OpenTable's own blog says noon, so trust the platform and confirm.
• House of Prime Rib (SF, OpenTable): the exception. It publishes no rolling window or opening time at all; it is a deep queue where the first bookable table can sit many months out.
• Giulia (Cambridge, OpenTable): up to two weeks ahead, and since January 1, 2026 each new day opens at 10am Eastern rather than the old midnight.
• Mother Wolf (LA, Resy): up to 7 days ahead, refreshed daily, with a Resy editorial putting the daily opening at 9am Pacific. Watch for the Miami location on the same platform.
• Carbone London (SevenRooms): reporting conflicts between a 30-day and a 60-day window, with a 9am UK-morning opening reported, plus a per-person deposit.

How to find a specific restaurant's exact opening minute

When a number is not published, you can reverse-engineer it in a day. Open the venue's booking page and find the furthest-out date it lets you select; that gap in days is the window. Come back the next morning at the same time and see whether one new date appeared, which means a rolling window, or the same block is still there, which points to a synchronized release you can then pin to a schedule. If you want the minute without the detective work, call the restaurant and ask the host when reservations open and how far out; they will usually just tell you. And sync your phone's clock to network time before any timed opening, because the moment that matters is the platform's server clock, not your screen.

Or let the opening watch itself

Knowing the exact minute only helps if you can act on it faster than a room full of people aiming at the same second, and at the hardest tables that is a race a human thumb was never built to win. That is the part SeatSwiper takes over. You give it the restaurant, your dates, and your party size, and it watches the book on Resy, SevenRooms, or OpenTable around the clock, then books the instant a table appears, whether that is the scheduled opening a week or a month out or a cancellation surfacing the afternoon before service. It books on your own reservation account, in your own name, nothing resold. First booking free, then a flat $5 only when it actually books you a table, no subscription. Honest limits: it works on those three platforms only, not Tock or restaurant-direct systems, it needs your reservation account connected, and on a single hot seat it can still lose the race to someone else's request. It does not turn the odds into a guarantee; it just puts you in the running every time the book opens.