High-profile hospo duo Martin Benn and Vicki Wild will oversee the food at the $35 million project. The owner says wines will be priced at half of what you pay in restaurants.
Hospitality couple chef Martin Benn and Vicki Wild will take the restaurant reins at a four-level private members’ club in a landmark site above Parliament Station.
67 Pall Mall, a London-based club with branches in Singapore and Switzerland, will open its $35 million Melbourne outpost next year with Benn and Wild in charge of four dining and drinking areas spread over 2000 square metres.
As part of the redevelopment of 85 Spring Street, the “culinary partners” will oversee a wine bar, restaurant, champagne and seafood bar and a rooftop terrace with a cocktail bar overlooking Treasury Gardens.
This is the first permanent project for the duo who ran the three-hatted Sepiarestaurant in Sydney until 2018 and then moved to Melbourne to open the Society fine diner with restaurateur Chris Lucas, parting ways with him shortly after it opened in 2021.
Benn says it will have a capacity to seat 300 people and be open from breakfast to late night, which “adds another dimension to Melbourne hospitality”.
The members’ club, which will also open in France’s Bordeaux and Beaune next year, specialises in wine. More than 5000 labels will be on offer in Melbourne; 3000 will be Australian, with 1000 from Victoria. Around 1000 will be available by the glass.
Owner of 67 Pall Mall, Grant Ashton, says the yearly membership will be $2300, with a $1500 one-off joining fee. The club’s wines, he says, will be sold at less than standard restaurant pricing.
“The membership model allows us to offer wines with sensible mark-ups rather than chase margins or profits through the wine list, often around half the restaurant price,” Ashton said.
Benn, who is known for fine-dining creations that saw Sepia named The One to Watch in the 2015 list of The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, will keep the food relatively simple in the entry-floor club lounge, such as burgers, steak and charcuterie. More elevated dishes such as roasted miso toothfish with red pepper ponzu butter and soy glazed rib of beef served with sea urchin mustard will be available in the restaurant a floor above.
He will also instigate an oyster ageing program that will involve storing live oysters in a temperature-controlled room for two to three weeks to allow their flavour to develop.
“The food, though, is not about pushing any fine-dining boundaries. We just want the members to be happy,” he said.
The pair have been approached multiple times to open and run stand-alone restaurants in the last three years but, “why would we? We have nothing to prove, we have done it, it’s so all encompassing, we get more joy now from training up the next generation of staff,” Wild said.
With 140 staff to be employed at 67 Pall Mall, Benn said his aim is to nurture talent in Melbourne and to train chefs in the old-school basics of cooking like meat and fish butchery.
67 Pall Mall’s first Club in London opened in December 2015, and has plans to open in Dubai, Shanghai, Bangkok and Tokyo. The Melbourne club will allow reciprocal membership and offers other lures such as wine storage for members, and masterclasses on subjects from chablis to wellbeing.
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