What are the busiest days for you?
Fridays and Saturdays get booked up pretty quickly. We’re closed Tuesday and Wednesday, and we call the remaining nights (Thursday, Sunday, and Monday nights) ‘school nights.’ Those tend to be a little bit easier from a reservation standpoint, but I’d say that just about all reservations are committed within five days of becoming available.
What’s the scene like on one of those busy days?
I always say that you can tell service is going well when our servers and bartenders are sort of dancing as they ring things in. It’s high energy — the music’s loud, the people are loud, and everyone’s just there to have a good time. Sure, it’s a restaurant, but it’s a bit of party when things are going the right way.
Do you allow walk-ins?
Yes, and we definitely encourage people to walk in. We reserve a couple seats at the bar on the first turn on school nights, but after that, the bar is actually held exclusively for walk-ins and we maintain a waitlist for those seats. If you come in and there’s not a spot available, we welcome folks to stay and grab a drink. It’s what gives the whole space the feel of being somewhere between a restaurant and a bar.
Does the Notify list on Resy help with reservations?
Yes, I always recommend that people use Notify because it’s just so much faster than any other option. I have a suspicion that — unlike Albi, where folks plan in advance to have dinner there — at La’ Shukran, someone manages to snag a reservation and then figures out who to bring along with them. So sometimes, things end up changing.
But as soon as a reservation becomes available, it’s almost immediately snatched up — it’s not unusual to have several hundred people on the list. In fact, when we first got started, I remember nights where we’d have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 people on the Notify list.
