Restaurant Deposits and No-Show Fees, Explained (2026)

Published June 6, 2026 · Updated June 6, 2026

Nick Kokonas built Tock in 2014 after watching no-shows bleed his Chicago restaurant Alinea, and the prepaid-ticket model he invented is why so many of 2026's hardest tables now ask for money before you sit down.

The lineage of the modern deposit runs straight through Kokonas. His argument was simple: a restaurant with a fixed number of seats and a no-show rate of fifteen or twenty percent is giving away its most perishable product, the empty table, for nothing. Tock answered that by selling dinner like a concert ticket, paid in full at booking. Resy and OpenTable, built on free reservations, have since added their own credit-card holds and fee tools, and the result is a landscape where the table you most want is the table most likely to ask for a deposit. Understanding the three models below is how you avoid an unpleasant surprise on your statement.

The Three Models: Prepaid, Deposit, and Card Hold

A prepaid ticket, the Tock original, means you pay the full menu price, including tax and gratuity, at the moment you book. You are buying a ticket, and like a concert ticket it is governed entirely by the restaurant's own cancellation policy. Brae in Birregurra runs a version of this for its tasting menu, taking full payment at booking. A deposit, by contrast, is a smaller sum, commonly 25 to 100 dollars per person, that is applied as a credit toward your final bill at the table. You forfeit it only if you no-show or cancel past the window. The third model, the card hold, charges nothing at booking: the platform stores your card and the restaurant can charge a fee only if you fail to show or cancel late.

The distinction matters because the three feel identical at booking and behave very differently if your plans change. A prepaid ticket can be entirely non-refundable. A deposit is usually refundable inside the window and forfeited outside it. A card hold costs nothing unless you breach the policy. Before you click confirm, the single most useful habit is to read which of the three you are agreeing to, because the word deposit gets used loosely for all of them.

How Each Platform Handles It in 2026

On Tock, bookings come as either prepaid experiences or deposit reservations, and each restaurant sets its own cancellation terms. Free Tock reservations can always be cancelled through the platform; paid ones follow the policy the restaurant published. On OpenTable, the credit-card hold feature does not charge your card at booking. It places a pending hold and lets the restaurant charge a no-show or late-cancel fee only if you breach the terms. On Resy, cancellation and no-show fees are never charged automatically; a restaurant has to process them manually through the Resy operating system, which in practice means enforcement varies from room to room. Knowing this tells you how literally to take a stated fee on each platform.

The fees exist because they work. OpenTable has reported that offering deposits cut no-show rates by more than half, and that guests who leave a deposit are far less likely to cancel at the last minute. From the diner's side, that means the deposit is not a punishment but the mechanism that keeps the hardest tables bookable at all. The restaurants asking for money up front are usually the ones worth the trouble.

How to Read a Cancellation Window Before You Book

Every paid booking carries a window, and the window is the only number that matters if your plans might shift. A typical fine-dining policy allows a free cancellation up to 48 or 72 hours before the seating, after which the deposit is forfeit or the no-show fee applies. Tasting-menu rooms often run longer windows, sometimes a full week, because they buy ingredients against your booking. Read the exact hours before you pay, screenshot them, and put the cancellation deadline in your calendar the same way you would the reservation itself. If you are booking months out for a celebration, that deadline is easy to forget and expensive to miss.

Deposits by Restaurant Type

The deposit you meet tracks closely to the kind of room you are booking. Fixed-menu tasting counters are the strictest, because they buy ingredients against your seat and a no-show is a direct loss; expect full prepayment or a substantial per-person deposit, often with a week-long cancellation window. Brae in Birregurra is the clean example, charging the entire menu at booking. High-demand à la carte rooms in major cities tend toward the card-hold model, where nothing is charged unless you breach the policy, because they can resell a no-show table more easily than a tasting counter can. Steakhouses and large-format restaurants increasingly ask for a deposit on big parties specifically, where a no-show of eight is catastrophic.

Special occasions add their own layer. Festival weekends, New Year's Eve, Valentine's Day, and convention dates routinely carry prepaid or deposit terms even at rooms that take free bookings the rest of the year, because demand spikes and no-show risk rises together. The practical takeaway is to expect a deposit precisely when the table is hardest to get, and to read it as a signal that you are booking something in genuine demand. A room that asks for nothing on a peak night is either confident it can resell or not as sought-after as its reputation suggests.

What to Do If You Are Charged Unfairly

If a fee hits your card that you believe breaches the stated policy, start with the restaurant, not the bank. Most fees are processed by hand, especially on Resy, so a polite message pointing to the published window and your cancellation timestamp is often enough to reverse a genuine error. If the room will not engage and you have evidence you cancelled inside the window, your card issuer's dispute process is the backstop. Keep the booking confirmation and any cancellation email, because a documented timeline settles almost every dispute. For the wider booking playbook, our guide to impossible reservations and our concierge guide both cover how deposits fit the strategy for the hardest rooms.

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