Do you need reservations at Las Vegas restaurants, and which are hardest to get into?

For the famous rooms, yes, and the booking window is what matters. Carbone at Aria is the hardest table on the Strip; most celebrity rooms and steakhouses want one to three weeks for a Friday or Saturday. Casual places, food courts and most of Chinatown take walk-ins.

The hard ones

• Carbone, Aria: the window opens about 30 days out and prime weekend slots go the same morning. Book at the drop, or settle for the bar and lounge, which take limited walk-ins off-peak.
• Bazaar Meat, Palazzo: one to two weeks for a weekend.
• Momofuku, Cosmopolitan: opens 60 days out but holds a walk-in section, which makes it one of the easier good tables in that building.
• Nobu, Caesars Palace: the largest Nobu anywhere at 327 seats, so it absorbs more same-week bookings than most. The omakase is not served after 9 p.m.

Tricks that work

• Eat at 5 p.m. or after 9:30, when the same room has space.
• Take the bar; most of these rooms serve the full menu there.
• Ask your hotel's concierge, who holds allocations at the property's own restaurants. Tip $5 to $10 for a result.
• Set an alert in the booking app the day before, when cancellations appear.
• Bacchanal, the buffet, takes reservations that work as a line pass.

When it gets harder

New Year's Eve, Valentine's Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas menus are prix fixe with deposits and book out weeks ahead. F1 weekend (November 19 to 21) and the rodeo weekends fill the steakhouses, and CES fills everything near the Convention Center.

The map by budget is in where to eat in Las Vegas; pages for Carbone, Momofuku, Nobu and Bazaar Meat.