Two rooms 74 + 12 seats 118 labels Room service to 10pm
Dining at Headlands Club
Two places to eat and drink, one above the other: Perfume Point on the ground floor and The Gravels below it. Both are open to people who are not staying, and both take walk-ins, though the dining room fills from about seven.
Perfume Point
Perfume Point is the spit at Ahuriri where the whaling station rendered oil in the 1840s. The smell carried across the harbour and the name stuck, which tells you something about how Napier names things. Our dining room borrowed it in 2009.
Seventy-four seats at tables and twelve at a counter that faces the pass. The counter is walk-in only and is where people eating alone tend to end up — it is also, by some margin, the best seat for watching the fish come off the grill.
Hours
- Breakfast — 6.30 to 10.30, every day. NZ$34 per person, or included in most packages.
- Dinner — 5.30 to 9.30, Tuesday to Sunday.
- Closed Mondays. The brigade also cooks Saturday weddings in The Marine Room, and something has to give.
- Room service — 6.30am to 10pm, a shorter list, no tray charge.
- Bookings — up to eight online or by phone. Above that, talk to us and we will do it properly.
What is on it
The menu changes four times a year and about a third of it moves week to week. Gurnard and terakihi come off the boats at Ahuriri; lamb and beef from the Heretaunga plains twenty minutes inland; sweetcorn, stone fruit and Te Mata figs from February to April; olives and oil from a grove near Havelock North. There are always three things on the menu without meat in them, and they are not an afterthought.
Dietary requirements: tell us at booking rather than on the night and the kitchen will do something considered instead of something improvised. Nut allergies are handled seriously — the pastry section works on a separate bench.
The Gravels
The list
One hundred and eighteen labels. Sixty-one are from Hawke's Bay — most of them from the Gimblett Gravels, the shingle riverbed the Ngaruroro walked away from in 1867, which is twenty-two minutes inland and grows the best syrah in the country. The remaining fifty-seven are there to give the local wines something to argue with: Central Otago pinot, Marlborough chenin, and about a dozen from outside New Zealand.
Fourteen bottles are open on Coravin at any time, which means you can drink a glass of something you would never commit to a bottle of. Tasting flights of three are NZ$28; a flight of six Hawke's Bay reds is NZ$52 and is what most people come down for.
- Hours — noon until late, seven days.
- Bookings — not taken before 6pm. After that, for six or more.
- Food — a cheese board and a plate of Te Mata olives. That is the entire menu, deliberately.
- Corkage — NZ$20 a bottle, and we would rather you brought something interesting.
- Age — no restriction on the room itself; the licensing rules on alcohol apply as they do anywhere.
Eating in a room of your own
The Deco Room takes sixty seated or forty on a single long table, and is the room most often used for a birthday or a company dinner that does not want an audience. It has its own entrance off the first-floor lobby and its own service, so it never runs through the restaurant.
The Chart Room seats eighteen and does lunch for board meetings. The Marine Room takes 180 seated at rounds and is the wedding room — most Saturdays from October to April are already spoken for a year out.
Set menus start at NZ$78 per head for three courses. Matched wine from The Gravels is NZ$45 more. Enquire through the form and someone from events will phone you rather than email back and forth.