rewrite this title This Citi Card’s Dining Perk Scored Me a Hard-to-Get Table – NerdWallet

I’ve been trying to get a table at Musaafer, an upscale Indian restaurant in New York City, but I’ve never found a dinner reservation slot that works for me — and some nights, it’s booked out completely.

The event was part of Citi’s dining series for its premium card members and hosted in partnership with The Supper Club, a members-only group that puts on dinner parties around the world. To get a seat at the table, you’ll need to pay $100 plus tax for a ticket using your Citi Strata Elite℠ Card.

Citi invited me to attend this event as a member of the media to showcase its cardholder offerings. Here’s what it was like.

Most of Citi’s dining events are held in major cities, including New York City, Dallas, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles. Citi told me that it regularly assesses cardholder demand to determine where to host its events.

The dinner I went to was at LDV at The Maidstone, a boutique-hotel-and-restaurant combo in the Hamptons, a popular summer destination for New Yorkers.

For its dining series, Citi and The Supper Club take over an entire restaurant, meaning event guests have the venue to themselves. For some dinners, multiple chefs will partner to create a collaborative menu.

When I arrived, I was treated to some bite-sized snacks curated by the chefs from Musaafer and LDV at The Maidstone. There was a cocktail hour before the dinner, so I explored the intimate hotel lobby, which had live music, a photo area and a customizable hat-making station.

Once everyone was seated for dinner in the courtyard, representatives from Citi and The Supper Club spoke about the partnership before introducing the chefs behind the evening’s menu. The chefs mingled with guests the entire night, and I even got to chat with Musaafer’s chef about my woes trying to get a table.

As you might expect, the food was incredible, featuring dishes from both restaurants’ menus like LDV’s cacio e pepe cappellacci (so good!) and Musaafer’s lychee ceviche.

While Indian and Italian flavors didn’t seem very complementary on paper, everything worked together extremely well.

I especially loved trying a scaled-down version of Musaafer’s butter chicken experience, one of the restaurant’s signatures, and ending the night with a gelato and sorbet cart.

Before we all left, everyone got the hats they had made earlier in the evening at the hat-making station. I didn’t make one, but it was fun to see everyone trying on their creative designs.

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NerdWallet’s ratings are determined by our editorial team. The scoring formula takes into account the type of card being reviewed (such as cash back, travel or balance transfer) and the card’s rates, fees, rewards and other features.

The Citi Strata Elite℠ Card offers some of the most lucrative (but complex) dining rewards for a premium travel credit card, so it makes sense that Citi is investing so much in this dining series.

While cardmembers earn a respectable 3 points per $1 spent at restaurants, they can get double the number of points at restaurants on Fridays and Saturdays from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. Eastern time. It is a bit annoying to have another credit card perk window to keep track of, but a 6x earning rate on such a popular category is pretty impressive.

Citi’s focus on dining is a result of what the issuer has seen in demand from cardholders, according to Courtney Joseph, Citi’s head of reward products and premium customer experience.

The goal is “curating the best dining experiences that we can find for our cardmembers and meeting them where they are, as opposed to them having to seek them out themselves,” he told NerdWallet in an interview.

Citi also hosts The Curated Table with Mastercard, another dining series that brings together Citi Strata Elite℠ Card holders and prominent figures at major cultural events. For example, one of the dinners in 2026 will feature the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 team during the United States Grand Prix in Austin.

Meanwhile, Citi isn’t the only credit card issuer leaning heavily into dining. We’ve seen that with American Express’ acquisitions of dining reservation platforms Resy and Tock. Plus, AmEx and Chase both offer dining-related statement credits on select cards.

Anyone can view upcoming events hosted by Citi and The Supper Club online, but you have to hold the Citi Strata Elite℠ Card to purchase tickets.

Generally, you can expect tickets to cost $100 per person plus tax with a purchase limit of two tickets per event. The fee covers everything from food and drinks to customizable gifting stations.

While events do sell out, I’ve noticed from my own experience that it usually doesn’t happen instantaneously the way an event like Chase’s Dinner on the Court might — likely due to the size of the venues and the frequency of Citi’s events. That makes scoring a ticket a lot more accessible, since you don’t have to be online to purchase the exact moment they drop.

In my view, these dining events are an added benefit of holding the Citi Strata Elite℠ Card, not a primary reason to get it. Ultimately, the card will probably appeal the most to people who eat out a lot — especially during weekend evenings — and who fly with American Airlines, one of Citi’s major travel partners.

Overall, I thought my dinner in the Hamptons was an excellent deal for $100, especially in major cities like New York City, where meals can easily cost more than that.

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About the author

Benjamin Din is a lead travel writer at NerdWallet. He previously was a technology reporter at Politico, where he authored a daily newsletter covering tech and telecom policy.

Benjamin loves to travel — both for work and for fun. He’s reported from three continents and visited more than 55 countries. He has written for The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle and The (Johannesburg) Star, as well as covered two Olympics with NBC Sports.

His goal is to visit a new country and a new state each year. You can follow his adventures on Instagram and TikTok.