Most reservation guides cover only Resy. Here's the other half of the dining market — 8 of America's hardest restaurants that all live on OpenTable, across NYC, Las Vegas, Mexico City, and Oakland, with every release time our monitoring has confirmed, plus two Philadelphia rooms that release a month at a time.
Get OpenTable AlertsReservation alert guides love to ignore OpenTable. They'll spend ten thousand words on Carbone and Lilia and never mention Gramercy Tavern, Golden Steer in Las Vegas, or Handshake Speakeasy, the World's 50 Best #1 bar in 2025, which books on OpenTable and clears in seconds. The hardest OT reservations are every bit as competitive as the hardest Resy reservations. Most guides just never look.
Gramercy Tavern releases at noon ET, 28 days out. Union Square Hospitality's flagship — Manhattan's most consistent hard-to-book.
Don Angie's 7-day window is the tightest on this list. The Pinwheel Lasagna sells out in seconds.
9 AM ET drop, 14-day window. Thursday–Saturday only — the single-person Margherita is the trophy.
We show a release time only where our system has confirmed it. The verified badge means we've caught the release flipping into the calendar on multiple distinct days with sub-30-second lag — repeatable proof the schedule is correct. 4 of 8 venues currently carry that badge; the others have a confirmed schedule on file but we're still accumulating multi-day catch evidence, or no confirmed time yet.
We refuse to fake the verification status. If a venue is "confirmed" rather than "verified" below, that's honest. Most reservation guides will tell you a release time they've never personally observed. We tell you what we've actually seen.
| Restaurant | City | Release time (ET) | Days out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Golden Steer Confirmed schedule · multi-day evidence still accumulating Strip-Adjacent · Steakhouse | Las Vegas | 12:00 AM (midnight) | 42 days |
| Red Hook Tavern Verified by 73 catches · 0.32s lag Red Hook · American | New York | 12:00 AM (midnight) | 14 days |
| Contramar Confirmed schedule · multi-day evidence still accumulating Roma Norte · Mexican Seafood | Mexico City | 2:00 AM (1:00 AM in winter) | 60 days |
| Handshake Speakeasy Confirmed schedule · multi-day evidence still accumulating Juárez · Cocktail Bar | Mexico City | 2:00 AM (1:00 AM in winter) | 14 days |
| Don Angie Verified by 124 catches · 0.26s lag West Village · Italian | New York | 9:00 AM | 7 days |
| Una Pizza Napoletana Verified by 50 catches · 0.26s lag Lower East Side · Neapolitan Pizza | New York | 9:00 AM | 14 days |
| Gramercy Tavern Verified by 99 catches · 0.33s lag Flatiron · New American | New York | 12:00 PM (noon) | 28 days |
| Sun Moon Studio Confirmed schedule · multi-day evidence still accumulating Temescal · Tasting Menu | Oakland | 3:00 PM | 42 days |
A middle-of-the-night drop and a noon drop require completely different game plans. Here's what to do for each confirmed release time on this list.
Golden Steer (Las Vegas) drops at midnight ET with a 42-day booking window, so plan a Vegas trip six weeks out. Red Hook Tavern (Brooklyn) also releases at midnight, 14 days out; the room is small so its boundary-date inventory clears fast. Be on the OT page at 11:59 PM ET with a payment method on file.
Both release at midnight Mexico City time. Mexico City no longer observes daylight saving time, so that is 2 AM ET until US clocks fall back on November 1 and 1 AM ET until March. US-based diners have to stay up; locals are just refreshing at midnight. Handshake Speakeasy (World's 50 Best #1 Bar 2025) is the harder of the two — bar-top capacity is tiny and slots clear within seconds. Contramar has more capacity, a 60-day window, and is slightly more forgiving. Be on the OT page a minute before the drop with a payment method on file.
Two of America's hardest restaurants both drop at 9 AM ET on OpenTable. You can only realistically target one per day. Don Angie has the tightest window (only 7 days out) so it's the most acute. Una Pizza Napoletana is Thu/Fri/Sat only — pick a target weekend and refresh at 8:59:55 AM.
Gramercy Tavern at noon ET, 28 days out, is Manhattan's most consistent hard-to-book OT venue — set a calendar alarm for 11:59 AM.
Two Philadelphia rooms skip the daily drop entirely. Mawn says it releases the following month's reservations on the 1st at noon, and Her Place Supper Club says it releases on the third Sunday of each month at 6 PM ET. Each is one drop a month, so check the restaurant's own notice, be ready a few minutes early, and lean on cancellation alerts the rest of the month.
Sun Moon Studio in Oakland is the latest-releasing venue on this list — 3 PM ET (noon local). The unusual time means fewer competing diners are paying attention. Tasting-menu format and limited counter seating still make it hard to catch.
Three OpenTable venues are essentially impossible to catch at the release moment. Their fresh-inventory drops sell out faster than the time it takes a normal user's request to reach OpenTable's servers:
For these three, your only realistic strategy is cancellation alerts. Other diners book the table, then cancel a day or two before — that's when an alert service catches the slot the moment it reappears, often before the venue's notify list pings anyone.
ReservationFinder monitors every restaurant on this page 24/7. The moment a slot appears — whether it's a fresh release or a cancellation — you get an instant email or SMS with a direct booking link. Free to set up.
Most guides repeat what was true years ago. We measure what's true today.
For every venue on this page, we run continuous polling against OpenTable's public availability API. We look at the boundary date (today + the restaurant's known booking window) and record exactly when slots appear. The hour the boundary date transitions from empty to populated is — by definition — the release moment. We've been logging these events since early 2026.
The booking-window length (days out) is verified the same way — we ask OpenTable directly: how far out does this venue's calendar extend right now? That number is the booking window. For example, our data shows Golden Steer's calendar extends a full 42 days — longer than nearly any restaurant on Resy.
When a venue carries the "verified" badge, we've caught the release flip on multiple distinct days with sub-30-second lag from the recorded release moment. When it carries only "confirmed," the schedule is set in our system from a trusted source (the venue's own published policy, or historical observation) but we're still accumulating multi-day catch evidence. Until a venue's schedule is confirmed, we show no release time for it. We'd rather be honest about what tier of confidence applies than fake authority on data we haven't earned yet.
There's no single time — every venue sets its own. Two drop at midnight ET: Golden Steer in Las Vegas and Red Hook Tavern in Brooklyn. Most US OpenTable releases cluster between 9 AM and 12 PM ET (Don Angie and Una Pizza Napoletana at 9 AM; Gramercy Tavern at noon). Mexico City venues like Contramar and Handshake Speakeasy release at midnight local time: 2 AM ET until US clocks fall back on November 1, then 1 AM ET, because Mexico City no longer observes daylight saving time. Sun Moon Studio in Oakland is the late outlier at 3 PM ET. Some venues release a month at a time instead of daily: Mawn says it opens the following month on the 1st at noon, and Her Place Supper Club says it releases on the third Sunday of each month at 6 PM ET.
Gramercy Tavern releases reservations on OpenTable at 12:00 PM (noon) ET, 28 days before your desired date. The 28-day window matches Union Square Hospitality's published reservation policy.
Don Angie releases reservations on OpenTable at 9:00 AM ET, only 7 days in advance. The 7-day window is by far the tightest on this list — most OT venues run 28+ days. The short window means demand concentrates: slots vanish within seconds, and most diners only discover availability through cancellation alerts.
Una Pizza Napoletana releases reservations on OpenTable at 9:00 AM ET, 14 days before your desired date. Anthony Mangieri is open Thursday through Saturday only, and the menu is just five single-person Neapolitan pizzas — so capacity is small and demand is high. The 14-day window catches a lot of casual diners off-guard.
Golden Steer in Las Vegas releases reservations on OpenTable at midnight ET (12:00 AM), 42 days before your desired date, confirmed by our 24/7 monitoring. The 1958 Vegas institution (Sinatra ate here, so did Elvis) gets aggressively booked the second the window opens. The 42-day lead time means you have to plan further ahead than for almost any NYC restaurant.
Because it is midnight in Mexico City — the natural "new day" tick there. Mexico City stays on UTC-6 all year, so the drop is at 2 AM ET while the US is on daylight saving time and at 1 AM ET from November 1 until March. Both Contramar and Handshake Speakeasy follow this pattern. For US-based diners, this means staying up past midnight ET. For Mexico City locals, it's a normal midnight refresh. Handshake Speakeasy in particular (World's 50 Best #1 Bar 2025) clears within seconds.
It depends on the venue. The hardest OpenTable reservations (Gramercy Tavern, Don Angie, Una Pizza Napoletana, Golden Steer, Handshake Speakeasy) are every bit as competitive as Resy's hardest. But the OpenTable ecosystem skews more toward family-friendly, business dining, and longer booking windows, so the average OT restaurant is easier to book than the average Resy restaurant. The trick is knowing which OT venues are actually hard — most "reservation alert" guides skip them entirely.
ReservationFinder runs continuous monitoring against OpenTable's public availability API. For each venue with a confirmed schedule, we record every new slot the moment it appears in the calendar, with sub-second precision. The "verified" tier means we've caught the release flip on multiple distinct days with sub-30-second first-capture lag — repeatable proof the schedule is real. The "confirmed" tier means the schedule is set in our system from a trusted source (often the venue's own policy) but we don't yet have multi-day catch evidence to prove it independently. We publish no time for a venue whose schedule is not confirmed.
For most venues on this list, yes — if you're on the OT page 60 seconds before the drop, logged in, with a payment method on file, you can beat most other diners. For the absolute hardest (Don Angie, Handshake Speakeasy, Una Pizza Napoletana on a Friday), inventory clears in under 2 seconds — slow networks lose. Cancellation alerts are your most reliable strategy for those.
New openings we caught and alerts for each restaurant.