The First Name in Dining

The Payper team are big foodies, in fact Lewis is Auckland-famous for his fish tacos. So a company whose whole business is getting more people into more restaurants more often was never a hard sell around here.

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Mat Weir started First Table in Queenstown in 2014: a site selling the first table of the night at half price on the food. It now covers more than 4,100 restaurants across New Zealand, Australia, the UK and Ireland. When First Table went looking for a PR agency to run New Zealand and Australia in 2026, Payper got the job — along with a new chief executive to introduce: Alex Cappy, from Uber and Deliveroo.

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Hospitality is a hard category to get real news out of. Most newsrooms file a booking platform's product updates under marketing, and usually they are right to. What changes that is knowing which desk treats hospitality as a business story and which treats it as a night out, then arriving with something a reporter can use — restaurant numbers, booking patterns, what people are really spending on dinner.

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The category also never stops moving. Liquidations, the dining downturn, Michelin arriving, daylight saving — those stories break and are gone by lunchtime. So Payper works from inside First Table's Slack rather than at arm's length, as an extension of the marketing team and management. A reactive angle can go from a message to a pitched story inside the hour.

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Five months in, that has produced 24 stories across New Zealand and Australia. National radio. Two of the country's biggest news sites. An Air New Zealand inflight feature. A third of it Tier 1, and not a negative word anywhere. An estimated 2.4 million people reached, on a flat retainer of $25,000.

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Cappy and Mat Weir are now people journalists ring when they want to know how hospitality is actually doing. That is the job. The half-price dinners are a bonus.