Before Pan Koutlakis put restaurant offers on a phone, he put drink cards in the post. At Distill in Adelaide, where he became general manager at 19, he collected customers’ residential addresses and mailed invitations valid at particular times of night. The letterbox was doing a job that would eventually belong to an app: giving someone a reason to arrive sooner.
He remembers opening the nightclub after a private function, with people already inside. A room with a head start behaved differently. The first arrivals could join an evening already under way rather than conduct a small investigation into whether an evening might happen.
It is an unusually tangible beginning for a technology company. There are addresses, cards, a door and a clock. Today, Koutlakis is EatClub’s co-founder and CEO. The business operates in Australia, Britain and New Zealand, helping restaurants attract diners with offers tied to quieter trading windows. Behind the digital card and the pricing software sits a recognisable ambition: give the room a head start.
The letterbox was the first app
Koutlakis grew up in Adelaide and started working in cafes at about 11 or 12. He moved through washing dishes, cooking and making coffee before working in bars. At Distill, he progressed from collecting glasses to serving drinks and managing the venue while studying. Hospitality gave him a close view of how much work can take place before a customer appears.
The nightclub story matters because it makes the problem specific. Earlier arrivals brought immediate spending, but they also changed what later arrivals encountered. The room itself became more persuasive. A promotion aimed at one hour could affect the hours that followed.
Anyone who has hesitated outside a quiet restaurant knows the little social calculation involved. A beautifully laid table can look inviting. Twenty beautifully laid tables with nobody sitting at them can inspire an unexpected interest in the place next door. The furniture has done nothing wrong.
A delivery executive looks back through the door
His next apprenticeship took place in food delivery. He joined Suppertime in 2015 and later worked as foodora’s city CEO in Melbourne. Those businesses offered a different answer to the restaurant’s search for customers: take the food to wherever the customer happened to be.
Koutlakis had helped push that change. He also valued what a restaurant offered when people actually went there: atmosphere, company and food arriving directly from the kitchen. The experience could be desirable while the room still had too many empty seats.
EatClub emerged from that tension. Koutlakis worked with Ben Tyler and Matt Cantelo on a platform that would let restaurants publish offers when they needed more diners. The app launched in 2017. Restaurants could choose the availability and scale of the offer, rather than commit their entire week to a permanent promotion.
That control was central to his early explanation. A quiet service and a busy service demand different decisions. The pitch allowed for both.
“If you’re busy, don’t use the app. Simple.”
Pan Koutlakis, describing EatClub’s early model
There is an appealing modesty to that instruction. Software founders generally have reasons to encourage more software use. Here, a restaurant full of paying customers could leave the tool alone. The useful moment came when the owner looked across the room and wanted the scene to change.
A chef in the inbox
In 2016, Koutlakis sent cold emails to celebrity chefs. Marco Pierre White replied and became an equity partner. For a young company approaching restaurants, a chef’s participation gave the proposition a familiar face and someone who understood the trade.
White’s involvement also helped shape the product. The early task was learning what restaurant owners would use, an exercise that required more than an attractive screen. A venue has a service to run. A new tool must make sense within it.
The celebrity connection makes a neat anecdote, but the working arrangement is more interesting than the surprise reply. Koutlakis was combining experience from venues and delivery with another person’s knowledge of restaurants. That is a practical way to improve a proposal before asking busy people to take it seriously.
The first sale arrived quickly: he has recounted signing the first restaurant on the first cold call. One agreeable conversation cannot establish a market. It can, however, put an idea into service, where customers and restaurant staff start supplying much less theoretical feedback.
A city is built one neighbourhood at a time
By 2019, EatClub was testing how far the idea could travel. Koutlakis relocated to New York to lead the American rollout. An investor update recorded 170 restaurants joining in the first four weeks of activity and more than 150 orders a day.
The same update described a much smaller geographical unit than a country: the neighbourhood. In Australia, the team concentrated on places including Chatswood, Parramatta and Collingwood, building density among both restaurants and customers. A marketplace can have plenty of participants on paper and still be inconvenient at lunchtime.
For a diner, nearby choices matter more than an impressive national total. For a restaurant, the useful audience consists of people who might actually walk in. Koutlakis’s expansion problem was therefore stubbornly local, even when the plane ticket was international.
The record shows a founder willing to move to another city to work on that problem directly. It also supplies a useful corrective to the idea that putting a marketplace online removes geography. Dinner retains an address. So does the person deciding whether there is time to get there.
All three have to meet. A restaurant on the other side of the world cannot fill tonight’s gap around the corner.
The quiet work at the end of dinner
The company later cut overheads, restructured and closed its US operations after dining-room closures in 2020 disrupted its revenue. Koutlakis continued developing the business with investor support. The work included a payment product that addressed what happened after an offer had brought somebody through the door.
EatClub Pay let customers use the promised pricing through a digital payment card. Restaurants could participate without installing new payment hardware or undertaking a fresh integration. The offer could be applied without a voucher presentation becoming part of the evening’s entertainment.
Checkout is an easily underestimated scene. Friends are talking. Someone is trying to locate a wallet. A member of staff has other tables to attend to. Asking everyone to pause while a discount is explained adds a small ceremony that nobody ordered.
Removing that exchange made the pricing proposition more discreet. Koutlakis also identified the company’s payment development and restaurant pricing algorithms as reasons behind its next financing step. The work had moved deeper into the transaction, from suggesting a place to eat toward helping the visit conclude smoothly.
That progression fits the career that preceded it. An operator has to care about the last minute of service as well as the first customer through the door. A promising offer has more work to do once someone accepts it.
London, with the clock still running
In May 2025, EatClub announced an A$18.2 million Series A led by Co:Act Capital. The company entered London that year, opening another international chapter. Koutlakis was taking a familiar restaurant problem into a different collection of streets, venues and dinner habits.
By February 2026, the business announced a separate A$27 million pre-Series B led by Marbruck, with EVP and CoAct participating. Contemporary reports placed the valuation above A$200 million. Those figures describe the company’s financing; the daily work still involved getting an offer in front of somebody who might use it.
The UK plan extended beyond the capital, with Manchester named as the next launch in the February announcement. The proposed expansion brought the old neighbourhood question back at a larger scale: how do you build enough useful choices, close enough to enough people, for the habit to take?
Koutlakis’s public explanation remained direct. Restaurants needed demand at particular times; diners needed a reason to be flexible. An offer could make that flexibility worthwhile without requiring every customer to pay a lower price at every service.
The next invitation may arrive with the groceries
By May 2026, EatClub was also exploring a route through Commonwealth Bank’s app. The announced initiative concerned time-based dining offers for 8.8 million eligible customers. It represented a potential audience, with the companies describing a program they were exploring, rather than a completed rollout to everyone.
In August, EatClub announced Woolworths Online participation in EatClub Earn. Eligible spending could generate dining credit for a later meal. Grocery shopping and a restaurant visit were being connected through the payment card.
These developments widen the places where EatClub can find a prospective diner. The invitation need not begin with someone opening a restaurant app and already knowing they want dinner out. It can become part of an activity they were doing anyway.
The next border was already crossed by October. EatClub announced its New Zealand launch on 7 October 2026, with offers in Auckland and Wellington. The same mechanics travelled with it: venues chose when to release offers, and diners paid through a digital card. The invitation had acquired another pair of cities.
Koutlakis has spoken about making EatClub a household name in dining. That ambition will require many more ordinary decisions: whether to try a venue, whether to go earlier, whether the bill is straightforward enough to repeat the experience.
His story keeps returning to those decisions. A posted card once asked somebody to come to a nightclub at a useful hour. A phone now carries a more elaborate invitation. Between the two lies a career spent thinking about the people who might walk in, and the room waiting for them.