How to Get a Reservation at The Eighty Six in NYC

The Eighty Six is a 35-seat steakhouse tucked into the old Chumley's space in the West Village, and it's recently been ranked #12 on the World's 101 Best Steak Restaurants list. So yes — it's a big deal. And yes, getting a reservation is exactly as hard as you'd expect for 35 seats in Manhattan.

But the really interesting part, and the thing nobody warns you about, is that you can't actually book this place on Resy, OpenTable, or anywhere normal. The Eighty Six is DashPass-only. Reservations run entirely through DoorDash, and only DashPass members can see or book them.

How Reservations Work at The Eighty Six

The release window is 7 days in advance at 9:30 AM ET. That's shorter than almost any other hard table in the city — most places let you book two or three weeks out, which gives demand a little room to spread. Seven days means everyone who wants in is all looking at the same handful of days at the same time.

You'll need to:

• Have an active DashPass subscription on your DoorDash account (about $9.99/month or $96/year)
• Open the DoorDash app (or website), navigate to the Dine Out / Reservations section
• Find The Eighty Six and hit the 9:30 AM drop head-on

Most steakhouse-hunters in New York haven't even set up DoorDash DashPass yet, which has historically been the one thing working in your favor. That's changing fast. The "DashPass-gated" reservation model is something DoorDash has been rolling out for a handful of genuinely hard tables — The Corner Store is the other big one — and word has gotten around.

Why 35 Seats Changes Everything

Context: Carbone has about 85 seats. Rao's has 10 tables. The Eighty Six sits in between and leans smaller. On any given night there might be 35 people total in the dining room, split across a 5:30 seating and an 8:00 seating. That's it.

Translate that to booking math and it's brutal. Seven-day window × 35 seats × two seatings = roughly 490 reservation spots per week, minus holds for regulars and walk-ins. Realistic public availability is probably closer to 250-300 slots a week, for a restaurant that has genuinely global press. Your odds on any individual 9:30 AM drop aren't great.

The Drop-Time Routine

If you're going manual, here's what I'd recommend: alarm at 9:28 AM ET. Have the DoorDash app open, signed in, DashPass verified. Navigate to The Eighty Six's page. At 9:30:00 sharp, tap the date that's exactly seven days out. Pick a party size of 2 (parties of 3-4 are significantly harder — most of the dining room is two-tops). Grab whatever time appears, even if it's not your ideal.

If you see nothing, refresh once, then move on. DashPass drops tend to resolve within 30-60 seconds on this restaurant. Either you caught it or you didn't.

The Cancellation Strategy (This Is Where TablePass Matters)

Here's the thing about DashPass-gated reservations: cancellations drop back into the pool constantly, and they're visible only to DashPass members. That's a much smaller pool than, say, a Resy cancellation free-for-all. If you can watch the DoorDash reservations endpoint continuously, you'll catch cancellations that basically nobody sees.

That's what TablePass was built for. We run DashPass-authenticated scouts against The Eighty Six around the clock, and the moment a slot drops — whether it's from the initial 9:30 AM release or a cancellation at 4:47 PM on a Wednesday — it gets booked for whoever's first in the queue. You tell us the date, party size, and time window you want, and we handle the watching.

Set up monitoring for The Eighty Six on TablePass here. You'll still need your own DashPass subscription — we can't fake that — but the booking itself happens automatically on your account.

What the Room Is Actually Like

Walking into The Eighty Six is walking into Chumley's memory. It was a legendary Prohibition-era speakeasy on Bedford Street — the kind of place where writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald supposedly drank, though nobody can fully verify who actually sat in which corner. The current owners have kept the feeling: dark wood, low ceilings, the sense that the room has seen things.

The menu is short and steak-forward. Dry-aged ribeye for two. A burger that's quietly one of the best in New York. Tableside Caesar. A handful of seafood options that over-deliver. The wine list is more compact than you'd expect for a place at this price point, but the selections are very deliberate — someone who knows what they're doing picked every bottle.

It's expensive. It's small. It's hard to book. And it's worth every step of the hassle if you love a classic New York steak dinner done with the kind of care most modern restaurants don't bother with anymore.