We retired restaurant watching

For a month we watched 28 hard-to-book rooms across New York, Chicago, Miami, Las Vegas and LA the same way we watch campsites: reading each venue's public reservation calendar for a party of two, every few hours. 6,662 calendar reads between July 24 and August 25. 763 moments where a booked-out night opened up. 39% of the weekend slots we measured were sold out. Carbone, Via Carota and Lilia turned over the most — the full findings are in when restaurant tables actually open up, which stays up.

We stopped because reservation platforms actively resist being read. Reliable measurement would mean working around controls that exist on purpose, and we don't do that. When we made the call, 19 of our 33 restaurant checks were failing; three never worked at all. Watching something badly is worse than saying plainly that we can't.

What we run instead: the campsite observatory, where the sources don't fight measurement — and the agent builder, where you can watch any source that publishes honestly.