Bungalow NYC Cancellation Policy: Deposit, Fees, Cutoff

Here is the honest state of the evidence, as of September 2026: Bungalow, the East Village restaurant at 24 First Avenue, publishes no cancellation fee schedule anywhere on its own website. Its reservations page is unusually detailed about everything else, and that makes the omission meaningful rather than accidental. It tells you that parties of seven or fewer book on Resy, that new dates go live at 11:00 am Eastern exactly twenty days ahead (with the site flagging an exception around Tuesdays), that parties of eight to fourteen have to email the restaurant with forty to forty five days of notice, that fourteen guests is the ceiling, and that a 20% automatic gratuity applies to every party size. What it does not do is name a dollar penalty or a cancellation cutoff. Those live on the Resy booking screen for your specific date and party size, and they are repeated in your confirmation email, which is the only place you should trust them from. Our paired guide to getting a Bungalow reservation records a prepaid amount of roughly $25 per person that is credited toward your bill, with a cutoff commonly reported at about 48 hours. Read that as what the booking flow has been showing guests, not as a published house rule, and check the current figure at checkout before you commit.

Deposit and prepay terms

The deposit is the part that generates most of the anxiety here, and it helps to understand what kind of charge it actually is. Bungalow does not sell prepaid tickets the way a tasting menu counter does. The amount collected at booking behaves like a credit toward your dinner: you pay it up front, it comes off the final bill, and if you turn up and eat, it costs you nothing extra. It is a commitment device, not a surcharge. That distinction matters because a room with twenty odd prime tables and a few thousand people chasing them cannot afford empty chairs, and holding money is the cheapest way a small restaurant has of making a booking mean something.

What that leaves you to verify at the moment of booking is three specific things. First, the exact amount per guest, which can move with party size and with the date. Second, the cutoff, meaning the last hour at which cancelling costs you nothing. Third, what happens if you cancel after it, since restaurants differ on whether the deposit is forfeited outright or applied as a per person charge. Resy displays all three before it takes your card, and the screen is easy to click past when you are racing a clock at 11:00 am. Screenshot it. If you later need to argue about a charge, the terms you agreed to are the ones that were on that screen, and the general shape of these agreements is laid out in restaurant cancellation policies explained. One more line item worth budgeting for, unrelated to cancelling but routinely a surprise: the 20% gratuity is automatic on parties of all sizes, including a two top.

For the large party lane the arithmetic is different again. Groups of eight to fourteen do not go through Resy at all; they are arranged by email with more than a month of lead time, which means the terms are whatever the restaurant sets out in that correspondence. If you are organizing a birthday for ten, get the deposit amount and the cancellation window written down in the email thread. A group booking made by conversation has no checkout screen to refer back to.

Is there a cancellation list?

No formal one, and that is true at nearly every hard restaurant in New York, not just this one. There is no queue you can join where a host works down names when a table frees up. What exists instead is Resy Notify, which is not a list in any meaningful sense: it emails or pushes an alert to everyone subscribed at the same instant a seat returns, so on a room this popular it functions as a starting gun fired into a crowd of thousands rather than an offer made to you. Showing up at the door and asking the host to note your name works differently and is worth doing, since that one genuinely is a short list, but it only covers tonight.

The thing that actually behaves predictably is not a list, it is a wave. Because a deposit is on the line and there is a cutoff, guests with wobbly plans do not cancel at random. They cancel at the last moment that costs them nothing, which bunches returns into the 24 to 48 hours before service. If the cutoff on your booking reads 48 hours, expect a cluster of seats to hit the Resy calendar right around the 48 hour mark for each upcoming date, with a second, thinner trickle in the final few hours before dinner when someone gets sick or stuck at work and eats the charge. Those two windows are where the supply is, and they are entirely separate from the 11:00 am release, which is covered in when restaurant reservations open. The catch is speed: a returned Bungalow table is visible to everyone at once and tends to survive on the open book for a minute or two, which is the same dynamic described in why Resy tables vanish instantly.

How to actually catch a cancelled table

Start by removing every step that costs you seconds later. Have a Resy account with a current card saved, know your party size, and decide beforehand which dates and which times you can genuinely make, because hesitating over whether Thursday works is how a seat goes to someone else. Keep the party at two if you can. A two top slots into a small dining room in far more configurations than a four, so proportionally more of the returned inventory fits you.

Then aim your attention rather than spreading it. Work backward from each date you want and check hard at the 48 hour mark, which is when the penalty driven wave lands. Check again on the afternoon of the date itself. Between those, check at hours when your competition is occupied: late at night, early morning, the middle of a workday afternoon. The 5:00 pm seating returns more often than the 7:30, because early tables are the ones people give up when work runs long, and service runs to a 10:00 pm last seating, so the tail end of the evening is real inventory too. Bungalow is closed Mondays, so ignore them entirely, and remember Tuesday sits oddly in the release schedule per the restaurant's own note.

Keep a fallback in your pocket so a miss does not wreck the night. The lounge and bar run first come, first served, so arriving near the 5:00 pm open and eating the smaller menu is a legitimate plan rather than a consolation prize, and the wider map of rooms with the same problem is in the hardest restaurants to book in NYC.

Where a watcher helps, and where it does not

Everything above is an attention problem. The 48 hour wave does not announce itself, and nobody is going to sit on a phone through a Tuesday afternoon for a dinner three weeks out. That is the job SeatSwiper exists to do: it watches the Bungalow book on Resy continuously for your dates, party size, and time range, and books on your own Resy account in your name the moment a seat comes back, including the deposit step. First booking free, then $5 only when it lands you a table. Be clear about the limit though. A watcher cannot change the restaurant's terms, cannot recover a deposit you forfeited, and can lose a race when a single returned seat draws a crowd. It is faster and more patient than a person, which is not the same as a guarantee. The mechanics are in how SeatSwiper works, and if you are still deciding how far ahead to plan the whole thing, start with how far in advance to book reservations.