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The latest San Francisco club you’d like to be part of is relatively affordable – if you have dot-com bucks. For the rest of us, it’s a $300,000 membership in which we probably won’t indulge. It’s for SHŌ restaurant, which will open in 2023 at Salesforce Park, a rooftop garden in the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco. As reported by FunCheapSF, it’s the first NFT-based restaurant and private club to open in the city, and while membership starts at $7,500, it, er, expands to $300k per year.
The SHŌ Group’s flagship Japanese cuisine restaurant will sit in the middle of the 5.4-acre rooftop garden which is free and open to the public. This lovely greenspace with a ‘living roof’ shows up on lots of San Francisco “to do” lists with its botanical offerings and a 247-geyser art installation that sprays water in coordination with the buses moving on the street 70-feet below.
But this lounge will not be free and will take up square footage in the otherwise free-range park. Billing itself as a ‘culinary entertainment and nightlife experience,’ SHŌ will introduce US diners to Irori cuisine, cooked using locally sourced ingredients on a 40-square-foot fireplace fired by charcoal and kindling. This will replicate the rustic farmhouse dining that Japanese farmers have done for centuries to create umami-rich fare. There will also be a sushi bar, and tapas and small dishes on the menu.
The restaurant and club's expensive membership is based on NFTs, verifiable on the blockchain and resellable. Membership will have three tiers, all of which afford access to the members-only menu, a 24-hour concierge who makes reservations and arranges courtesy transportation, and the private lounge located at the rooftop level of the restaurant (so, the rooftop of the rooftop).
At the mid-tier, you also get Omakase meals with celebrity diners, mastermind groups and educational programming. At the top tier, you’ll get unspecified benefits as well as a ‘highly curated’ trip to Japan, says the company's press release, with access to things common riffraff don’t get to visit.
Besides the restaurant, there will be a SHŌ Market for Japanese food on the building’s ground level. SoMa neighborhood eaters will be able to grab a freshly-made-up bento box for lunch or grab-and-go salads, sakes, and other take-away treats.
So why buy in now? You can be a founding member with lifetime global access membership, and access to all future SHŌ Group rollouts.
Looks like we need to borrow a little cash—could you maybe spare a few hundred k?