Hip-Hip-Hooray!!!
The massive Japanese restaurant planned for the park at Salesforce Tower will not move forward
by Lauren Saria Sep 8, 2023, 10:27am PDT
Lauren Saria is the editor of Eater SF and has been writing about food, drinks, and restaurants for more than a decade.
It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone keeping an eye on the health of downtown San Francisco or the NFT market that the plan to open a massive upscale Japanese restaurant atop Salesforce Park has stalled. SFGATE reports that SHŌ Restaurant, the NFT-backed club and restaurant first announced in June 2022, will not come to fruition. Josh Sigel, the entrepreneur behind the vision for a rooftop bar with special members-only access for those who purchased those little bits of blockchain called non-fungible tokens, confirmed the news to the outlet. “We have reached the difficult conclusion that bringing SHO to life atop Salesforce Park is not possible at this time,” Sigel wrote in an emailed statement.
Sigel’s plans always seemed to toe the line between ambitious and impossible. In late June 2022, he announced details about the cost of memberships to the restaurant and club, which would be sold as NFTs. The lowest tier membership would have set customers back $7,500 while the highest came in at an eye-popping $300,000 and included perks such as “a share of the club’s revenue” and a trip to Japan. The memberships were supposed to go on pre-sale in August with public sales slated for the fall, but SFGATE reports that never happened.
The Transbay Joint Powers Authority, which manages Salesforce Park, says they terminated the lease with SHŌ in July of this year — about one year after Sigel hosted an extravagant groundbreaking party. Construction was supposed to have started not long after, but per SFGATE the project never even secured the necessary permits.
Looks Like San Francisco Isn’t Getting a Fancy NFT Restaurant After All
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