Booking calendar · data
How Japan's hard-to-book restaurants take reservations: 1,240 restaurants in numbers
SHOKU NOREN, a Tokyo reservation desk, records how and when 1,240 hard-to-book restaurants in Japan open their reservation books. These are the totals across that data, as of 2026-10. Every figure below is recalculated from the same records that power each restaurant's page.
How reservations are taken
- 243 of the 1,240 restaurants (20%) take reservations by phone only, almost always in Japanese.
- 830 (67%) take reservations through booking platforms such as Ikyu, TableCheck and OMAKASE.
- 43 (3%) take reservations through their own website or a web form.
- 59 (5%) accept new guests only through an introduction from an existing guest.
- 65 (5%) take no reservations at all; guests queue on the day.
Booking platforms (a restaurant can use more than one)
- Ikyu: 478 restaurants
- TableCheck: 291 restaurants
- OMAKASE: 255 restaurants
- Tabelog: 255 restaurants
- Pocket Concierge: 155 restaurants
- Toreta: 32 restaurants
- AutoReserve: 9 restaurants
When reservations open
- 250 restaurants open reservations on a fixed day each month; 210 of them (84%) open on the 1st.
- Of those monthly releases, 94 open the following month, 107 open two months ahead and 29 open three months ahead.
- 115 restaurants open a rolling window a set number of days ahead (most often 30 or 60 days).
- 349 restaurants take reservations at any time with no release day.
- 7 restaurants release seats quarterly.
- For 375 restaurants the release rule is not published or not yet confirmed; their pages say so instead of guessing.
The most common release times (Japan Standard Time)
- 10:00 JST: 40 restaurants
- 12:00 JST: 40 restaurants
- 11:00 JST: 28 restaurants
- 00:00 JST: 21 restaurants
Bookings made on someone else's behalf
12 restaurants state in their own booking terms that they refuse agency, concierge or proxy bookings; for these, the guest has to book in their own name. We record this only where the restaurant's own wording is on file.
Where the restaurants are
- 도쿄: 543
- 간사이: 338
- 주부·호쿠리쿠: 132
- 규슈·오키나와: 82
- 홋카이도·도호쿠: 67
- 요코하마·가나가와: 42
- 주고쿠·시코쿠: 36
How the data is collected
- Each rule is read from the restaurant's own website, its booking-platform page, Tabelog, published articles and, for a few, a phone call by our desk. The records hold 5,010 dated source notes.
- Each restaurant's page shows the date its rule was last verified. Rules change without notice, so a figure read months later may be out of date.
- 156 of the restaurants are in our reviewed collection; the rest are tracked for their reservation rules only.
How to cite
SHOKU NOREN, "How Japan's hard-to-book restaurants take reservations", data as of 2026-10, https://shokunoren.com/release-calendar/facts
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