Carbone Cancellation Policy: Fees, Deposits, and the $50 Question

As of September 2026, Carbone in New York does not publish a fixed cancellation fee or an upfront deposit anywhere a guest can read it in advance. The restaurant’s own site says nothing about fees, and its Resy listing works the way most hard Manhattan books do: you hold the table with a credit card on file, and the specific penalty terms for your party size and date appear on the Resy booking screen at the moment you confirm. That screen is the only place the real number lives, so read it before you tap the final button. If you have seen a $50 per person figure floating around, you are not imagining it, but it belongs to other rooms in the Carbone family, not the Greenwich Village original. This page covers what the New York policy actually looks like in practice, where those $50 numbers come from, and how cancelled Carbone tables find their way back onto Resy, which is the part most people reading a cancellation policy secretly care about. For the booking race itself, start with how to get a reservation at Carbone.

Deposits and prepayment: what Carbone New York actually asks for

Booking a standard table at Carbone is not a ticketed purchase. Nothing is charged when you reserve, there is no prepaid menu, and there is no deposit that gets applied to your bill. What Resy takes instead is a card authorization: your saved card is attached to the reservation as collateral against a no-show or a last-minute cancellation. The consequence is that the anxiety most people bring to this page, am I about to lose money the second I book, has a calm answer. You are not. Money only enters the picture if you fail to show up or cancel inside whatever cutoff the booking screen stated, and if your plans change with reasonable notice, releasing the table through Resy costs nothing at all.

Two practical notes on that. First, terms like these get adjusted, especially around holidays, large parties, and event nights, so treat the confirmation screen as the contract rather than anything you read elsewhere, including here. Second, changes go through Resy too: shrinking the party, shifting the time, or cancelling outright all happen from your own reservation page, and doing any of it before the cutoff keeps your card untouched. If a change will not go through online, the restaurant answers email at reservations@carbonenewyork.com. The general logic of card holds, cutoffs, and why restaurants moved to them is covered in how restaurant cancellation policies work.

Which Carbone are you asking about? The $50 answers belong elsewhere

Carbone is a multi-city restaurant now, and the cancellation terms are set room by room, which is exactly why search results contradict each other. If someone tells you Carbone charges a $50 deposit, they are describing a different Carbone than the one on Thompson Street:

• Carbone London takes a real deposit, £50 per person, applied to your final bill when you dine. Cancel after 12pm on the day of the reservation and the deposit is forfeited.
• Carbone Vino in Miami’s Coconut Grove charges a fee of $50 per person for a dinner cancellation not made by 12:00 PM on the day of the reservation, with lunch requiring at least 12 hours of notice.
• Carbone Las Vegas at Aria holds a card and applies a per-guest charge for no-shows and late cancellations, with the exact figure and cutoff shown on the booking screen.
• Carbone New York publishes no number in advance. Card on file, terms disclosed at booking, nothing charged for a timely cancellation.

So the honest summary is that the $50 figure is a family convention, not a New York rule. It is still a useful signal, because it tells you the scale of penalty Major Food Group considers normal, and it is a reasonable guess at what a late-cancel charge in New York would look like if one applied to your booking. But the New York screen is the authority, and it can differ by date and party size.

Is there a cancellation list at Carbone?

No. There is no formal waitlist you can put your name on and no standby book the host keeps for people who called nicely. When a Carbone reservation is cancelled, the table does not go to a person, it goes back to the platform: the slot simply reappears on Resy, visible to anyone who happens to be looking at that exact moment. Resy’s Notify feature will ping you when that happens, but a ping is an invitation to a footrace, not a hold, and for a room this contested the table is often claimed before most Notify recipients have unlocked their phones. Why open slots at famous rooms evaporate this fast is its own subject, covered in why Resy tables vanish instantly.

What replaces a list is a rhythm. Cancellations at a heavily booked restaurant are not evenly spread across the week; they cluster where the policy pushes them. People holding a Carbone table they cannot use tend to release it at two moments: casually, days out, as plans firm up, and then in a sharper wave in the 24 to 48 hours before service, when the reality of a card charge concentrates the mind and everyone still holding a table they will not use finally lets go. Day-of mornings and the hours right before the cutoff are when the book breathes. That wave is predictable even though any single table inside it is not.

How to actually catch a cancelled Carbone table

Treat the cancellation wave as its own booking strategy, separate from the 10am race for new dates. It usually offers better odds, because the audience is smaller: everyone knows when new dates open, almost nobody is watching a sold-out Tuesday at 11:40pm. The manual version looks like this. Pick a target week rather than one sacred date, since flexibility multiplies your chances. Check the Resy page at the low-attention hours, late night and mid-afternoon, when a returned table can sit unclaimed for whole minutes. Check hardest in the final two days before your target, where the penalty-window wave lands. Keep your Resy account signed in with a card saved so a found table is three taps from confirmed, not a form away. And turn on Notify anyway, because a losing lottery ticket is still occasionally a winning one.

The manual version has one flaw, which is that it is a job. The table appears at an hour you do not control and lasts seconds, so the deciding factor is not cleverness but uninterrupted attention, and that is a thing software does better than people. SeatSwiper watches the specific Carbone table you want on Resy, around the clock, and books it on your own account, in your own name, the moment a cancellation puts it back. It rides exactly the wave described above without you staring at a phone through the day-of window. The first booking is free, then a flat $5 only when it actually gets you the seat. The mechanics are in how SeatSwiper works.

The bottom line

Booking Carbone New York costs nothing up front and cancelling with notice costs nothing at all; the card on file exists to punish silence, not changed plans. The $50 deposits and fees you have read about are real but belong to London, Miami, and the family’s other rooms, each with a noon-day-of flavor of cutoff. And the absence of a cancellation list is not bad news. It means every table someone gives back returns to a public pool on a fairly predictable schedule, and the person, or the software, watching at the right moment gets it.