A club that would have us as a member

Every­one has dif­fer­ent reas­ons for being in the Wel­ling­tonista, and one of mine is that it means I get invit­a­tions from lovely people to do cool things. That’s all very well and good, but it could be a little ali­en­at­ing for you guys. So today, I’m going to tell you about a secret spe­cial club YOU can join that means you get to swank about on Ins­tagram with your free food and booze too. It’s called the PRIME Club, which bills itself as Wel­ling­ton’s Premi­er Culin­ary Social Club, and it’s part of the Portlander Res­taur­ant at the Rydges Hotel. You sur­render your email address and in exchange you’ll receive invit­a­tions to events with their sup­pli­ers. So far I’ve been to a whisky tast­ing with Per­not Ricard and a fil­let steak even­ing with Wakanui Beef. Oth­er events have fea­tured Veuve Clic­quot, Ply­mouth Gin and Glen­mor­angie tast­ing. I know they have sea­food plans as well. Oh, and did I men­tion that so far, with the excep­tion of the Glen­mor­angie tast­ing, the events are FREE?

What’s great about these events is that it isn’t just about stick­ing as much as you can in your mouth, you actu­ally get to learn. As we sipped red wine, the fil­let was broken down, por­tioned and cooked in front of us by exec­ut­ive chef Tim McClay. In the past 12 months, they have served more than 3600 por­tions of the fil­let steak, it’s by far the most pop­u­lar on their menu. Now, before I tried the Wakanui I was like why would you order fil­let when you could get some­thing like the OP Long Bone with much more taste (and also a giant bone), but as it hap­pens, the Wakanui – as a res­ult of the sweet life it has led – has heaps of fla­vour, as we dis­covered eat­ing it com­pared to a reg­u­lar gen­er­ic fil­let from the butcher. I mean yeah, sure, if there’s an OP Long Bone on offer I’m prob­ably still going to choose that, but it’s good to have options!

Mean­while at the whisky tast­ing, amongst the nine we tried, we dis­covered The Mac­al­lan Ruby was deli­cious, and not dis­sim­il­ar to an Old Fash­ioned. The look of hor­ror on the Per­nod Ricard rep’s face when we sug­ges­ted mak­ing an Incep­tion Old Fash­ioned with the $280 a bottle whisky was worth the price of admis­sion alone. The lovely Rhi­an­non from Portlander has listened to guests’ feed­back from the very first event and so you will not be sub­jec­ted to an hour long Power­point on the his­tory of whisky before you’re allowed your first taste, I prom­ise you. But it is always nice to know a little bit about what you’re drink­ing.

At the Portlander 65% of their cus­tom­ers are hotel guests which means 35% aren’t. That sounds obvi­ous, but think about it – when was the last time you went to a hotel res­taur­ant to eat when you wer­en’t stay­ing there? So they must be doing some­thing right! This focus on their pro­du­cers and edu­cat­ing their audi­ence is really pay­ing off for them. Their Wel­ling­ton on a Plate event this Fri­day – The Portlander Mar­ket Place – will be a fant­ast­ic show­case for that philo­sophy. If you can­’t afford a tick­et (or even if you can), I really do recom­mend join­ing the PRIME club and keep­ing a close eye on your emails – gen­er­ally ses­sions are lim­ited to a dozen first come first serve. See you at the next one?