2 /5 Jing Xie: We celebrated NYE at City Social on 31.12.2025 with a 5-course menu. While the food was very good, the experience was overall disappointing due to the services quality.
First, we arrived right at 9.30pm our booking time and were told to wait for 10-15min as the table was not ready. We sat at the bar and ordered a gin and tonic, which took also 15min to prepare. We sat down at our table around 9.50pm.
When we started the menu, there was a long wait between each of the course. We waited at least 30min between our first and second course! That means by 10.30pm we were still waiting for the second course.
It was a very stressful experience as when we called the restaurant before the evening, they told us all the dinners would finish before midnight and then they would move everyone to the bar area before midnight.
This clearly did not work as at 11.50pm, we just finished our 4th course and hadn’t had dessert yet. I was stressed about not finishing the menu before midnight. Eventually we had to leave the table to go the bar area for the midnight countdown and go back to the table for the dessert after 12am, all because the services had been extremely slow.
In addition to the slowness, the waiters and the waitresses kept forgetting about our requests. We asked someone for the drinks menu - they said yes and they disappeared. We had to ask someone else again. This happened at least 3 times throughout the night.
We understand NYE was an extremely busy time but we had been in other similar upscale restaurants in previous years for NYE celebration and had not experienced such poor quality of services and it was genuinely surprising.
I also want to point out the evening was very expensive. The 5-course menu alone was £250pp. On top of that we ordered drinks so our bills came down to £700+ for the night. The service charge alone was £100 so it’s incredible how little you got for what you pay. The service quality really did not match the price tag. I almost wanted to decline to pay for the service charge but ultimately still paid as I felt it was NYE and still appreciated all the staff’s work.
I don’t know if the service is better on usual days, but based on the NYE experience I would not recommend City Social for anyone who wants to have a fun NYE evening. There are many better places to go in London that charge you for much less.
