City Club LA — Restaurant in Los Angeles

Unprofessional. Discriminating. Unethical. Unapologetic.

Customer service, professionalism, modern day business ethics. Those three values were shockingly absent and terribly delivered from Larry Ahlquist, General Manager of City Club LA. In-short, an incident arose at our wedding and we provided feedback to City Club LA. What we received was nothing close a professional response to us and our family from Larry, he immediately blamed us and our family for the incident that occurred during our special day. Larry, as the head representative of City Club LA, was very rude, discriminated my wife and I as insignificant and irrelevant people, and pointed the finger and fault on us. Keep in mind that we only provided feedback.

What could they be missing to attract younger members? That leads me back to the three values: Customer Service, Professionalism, and Modern Day Business Ethics. So here is where I would like to point out the cons, which is primarily from Larry Ahlquist in management. Paying in the five figures for an event and a special day, one would expect some professional customer service, especially from the General Manager as a crucial representative of City Club LA.

So what happened? Here is the backstory. We thought the special day went smoothly without any issues, but none of our guests wanted to ruin the day. Our family decided to wait and tell us the next day. We found out that a family member experienced an allergic reaction from nuts in a salad. The family member had specifically asked and requested the server if the dish had any nuts and to exclude nuts in their dishes. Trusting that the kitchen and server did their due diligence in excluding the nuts, the family member took a bite but still had an allergic reaction. It turned out the family member was still served nuts in the salad. Being a wedding, there are many witnesses and pictures of the day, food, and incident. Due to the severity of the incident and how important family is to us, we wanted to speak with the General Manager to share the incident and possibly help prevent future ones.

Speaking to the Larry, the General Manager, was appalling. I shared the serious incident of what happened to my family member with him. Shockingly, he accused my family member of wanting to eat the nuts on purpose and intentionally cause the poisonous allergic reaction. He stated that he has never dealt with people like us before and bringing up such an incident. To make matters worse, he brought up that we were insignificant customers. Larry was livid and unprofessional to me as a customer, especially since it was regarding our wedding and we spent five-figures on City Club LA. At the end of the phone call with him, we felt attacked, discriminated, mentally drained, and insulted. Up to this moment, we have not heard back from Larry or received an apology for both the allergic reaction incident and his behavior. This interaction has tainted our happy memories of what should have been a special place and day.

We wanted to share this experience since their target is modern day customers. There should be a professional relationship between a business and customers (especially paying customers) in today's world, and what Larry the General Manager demonstrated is the opposite of professionalism. The unethical business practice of blaming and discriminating customers was painful to experience. By sharing this review and experience, we hope that this type business practice is not supported and be discontinued. We hope this review helps you avoid the same disgusting customer services that we experienced, especially if one plans to have important and...

1 star for the Dining in the Dark experience here.

5 stars for City Club LA itself (I didn’t want to rate one star just because we had a bad experience at the Dining in the Dark hosted here at City Club)

I really wanted to love this experience... but honestly would not recommend to anyone. It was three courses of just okay food.

I went with my fiancé for his birthday and he got the meat menu and I got the seafood choice (that we had to preselect the week before). Ultimately that barely mattered because the first course (raw fish) and third course (a crushed ice syrupy dessert) were the exact same for both menus. While blindfolded, we tried describing our plates to each other and then we realized we had the same thing for 2/3 or the plates even though we each selected a different type of menu. The appetizer was not bad, the main plate was okay, and the dessert was an icy plate of artificial strawberry syrup, with all the portion sizes being very small. I think the chef tried to say they made the dessert for everyone in the room (vegans, dairy-free, etc) but I didn’t really understand the reasoning why they gave that to everyone. The flavored melting ice chunks weren’t that exciting and we definitely weren’t expecting that to be how they ended the meal.

Another part we had an issue with was no one told us when food was put in front of us when they brought it out… how are we supposed to know when quiet waiters don’t tell us the plate is in front of us. Just felt very unorganized and not prepared to cater to those experiencing this.

Also the waiter we had was not nice. He asked if we wanted a pre-dinner drink and we said sure we’ll have one beer to share, as in I’ll have some sips of my partner’s drink while we wait for the wine pairing, and he said “it’s illegal to share cocktails” but not in a joking way and we were so confused and I had to clarify with him I meant to bring one beer and I’ll have a few sips. But the beer actually never arrived until an hour later when we were blindfolded and had to turn it away since we had already ordered the wine pairing with the meal and didn’t want to have beer with the “carefully curated” pairing.

For $100 base price per person + $50/pp wine pairing + tax + automatic 20% gratuity (that they later said doesn’t go towards the staff tip and ask if you want extra gratuity added onto the bill) it was a bit ridiculous. And if you plan to eat around 8:30pm with the 8:30pm seating time, mentally prepare for it to be closer to 9:30pm by the time everything gets served.

I know sometimes things run late, so that part was okay and the MC was really personable and lovely with updating everyone with the delays (shoutout to her being the best part of dinner), but in hindsight with everything else compounded, the late start time was a bit frustrating.

So for two people with a wine pairing being almost $400, we highly recommend you going somewhere else nice nearby that will justify...

The staff at the restaurant could use a lesson in class, especially Manolo. I ate here for lunch yesterday with a group, including my mom who is in a wheelchair and had a cap on since she recently has had serious brain surgery. We’re seated at the corner of the restaurant kind of hidden behind the bar and it’s almost empty. After being seated, our waiter came up and let my mom know they have a no cap policy and asked if she could take off her cap. My mom let him know it was on for medical reasons and he understood. But about 10 mins later, another man named Manolo came up and spoke to my mom in a way the entire table could hear and said that they have a no cap policy. My mom shared again it was on for medical reasons, but Manolo kept on, even sharing that if it was a top hat, it’d be o. He let the whole table know there were two options - either my mom takes off her cap or we have to all move to a private room. This entire incident was mortifying and if it wasn’t for being guests, I would’ve gone off. I understand there is a policy - but Manolo spoke with no empathy and even seemed to take pleasure from my mom having to expose her bald head with a huge scar horizontally across. Luckily she has been through way worse and asked the table if they’d be ok with her taking off her cap with the class she has, and we ended up having a fine lunch. I will never come back and i hope City Club takes a lesson in trying to have staff trained with some decency.

Added to this, there’s a whole reception area and we were walking around the floor for 15-20 minutes checking out the views before sitting down and yet never were told about the no cap policy. It was only once we were seated and in front of our entire table. Isn’t a club supposed to have some...