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?