DinnerElite Press & Media
DinnerElite is a reservation-alert service that watches Resy and OpenTable across 224 of NYC's hardest-to-book restaurants and emails members the moment a table opens. We also publish the drop-time data behind it, free to cite with attribution.
Contact for press inquiriesLast updated July 14, 2026
Fast facts
Restaurants tracked
224 NYC restaurants
Platforms watched
Resy and OpenTable, 24/7
What it does
Emails you the moment a matching table opens. Never auto-books.
Free data
A public drop-time guide for every tracked restaurant
Members
500+ diners
Based in
New York City
Plans: every plan starts with a free 3-day trial that takes a card and charges nothing during it. Premium is $10/mo or $100/yr for unlimited watches. Expert is $29/mo and adds a human concierge who books for you.
Story angles our data can back
Which NYC tables are actually the hardest to get?
Our booking-window estimates rank all 224 restaurants by how far ahead their tables are typically claimed. For 28 rooms we quote the release window the restaurant publishes itself. For the rest it is modeled from price tier and neighborhood, so treat the ranking as an informed ordering rather than a measurement.
The reservation drop economy
Most hard-to-book NYC restaurants release tables on a fixed schedule, from Carbone's rolling drops to rooms that open books at midnight. We publish when each restaurant releases tables and what happens in the seconds after.
The cancellation window nobody watches
Tables at fully booked restaurants resurface when other diners cancel, often in a predictable window before dining time. That churn, not the initial drop, is how most short-notice bookings actually happen.
Bots, concierges, and the fight for a table
A growing industry sits between diners and reservations: paid booking apps, resale marketplaces, and alert services. We track the space closely and publish comparisons of how each model works.
Almost no famous NYC restaurant tells you whether you can walk in
We checked 20 of the hardest rooms on two surfaces each, the restaurant's own website and its booking listing. Eleven publish a walk-in route, Atomix states outright that reservations are required, and eight publish nothing on either surface. The useful finding is where the policy lives: The Mulberry and Vic's both state one on Resy while their own websites say nothing, so a diner reading only the restaurant's site would conclude they take no walk-ins. Every line is a quote from a page you can open in a minute. Read the data.
Restaurants are quietly leaving Resy
Our mid-July 2026 catalog audit caught ten hard-to-book tables switching booking platforms with no announcement, across three restaurant groups: Happy Cooking and the Don Angie team moved to OpenTable, Raku, Semma, and Rezdôra moved to SevenRooms, and The Corner Store moved to DoorDash. A second pass on 2026-08-05 caught two more, Sartiano's and Sal Tang's. Every mover in both passes went away from Resy. We published the full list, the method, and what silent switches break for diners. Read the data.
How to cite our data
Everything we publish is free to cite with a link to the source page. Start with the hardest reservations ranking, the per-restaurant drop-time guides, or the catalog-wide breakdown of all 224 tracked restaurants by platform, neighborhood, and price. If your story needs a cut we haven't published, email us and we'll pull it from the catalog.
Suggested attribution: "according to DinnerElite, a service that tracks reservation availability across 224 NYC restaurants" with a link to the cited page.
Boilerplate
DinnerElite is a New York reservation-alert service for the city's hardest-to-book restaurants. Members add a restaurant to their watchlist with their dates, times, and party size, and DinnerElite watches Resy and OpenTable around the clock and emails them the moment a matching table opens. The service sends alerts and never books automatically. Its Expert plan adds a human concierge who secures the table for you. DinnerElite also publishes free drop-time data showing when each of its 224 tracked restaurants releases tables.
Working on a story?
Email us what you're reporting and the numbers you need. We answer fast, and if we can't back a claim with data, we'll say so.
jacques.snchz@gmail.comWriting about NYC dining regularly? See the partner program and the embeddable drop-time widget.