Looks Like San Francisco Isn’t Getting a Fancy NFT Restaurant After All

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.

Spicy chips pulled off shelves after California hospitalizations

The Texas-based manufacturer of Paqui’s One Chip Challenge, a potato chip flavored with Carolina Reaper and Naga Viper peppers, is pulling the product from shelves after three California teens ended up in the hospital after eating them and one teen in Massachusettes died. The company marketed the chips through TikTok, the Chronicle reports.

Farmhouse Inn and its Michelin-starred restaurant have been sold

The Chronicle reports that Forestville’s Farmhouse Inn, a luxury hotel with a one-Michelin-starred restaurant in Sonoma County, has been sold to wine mogul Bill Foley. Foley, the man behind Foley Entertainment Group, also owns or has a partial ownership stake in the Las Vegas Golden Knights, Healdsburg’s Hotel Les Mars, and the recently opened Goodnight’s Prime Steak + Spirits, also in Healdsburg.

Bay Area’s open-air Filipino block party returns this month

On Saturday, September 16, Undiscovered SF, the Filipino block party and creative market, will return to Kapwa Gardens in SOMA Pilipinas. The event starts at noon and attendees can expect food from Tasty Tings, who will be “mixing Jamaican, Filipina, Chinese, and Creole flavors in handmade Jamaican patties”; Uncle Tito’s, Filipino-American pop-up; and Wyldflour, who will sling “Filipino style empanadas with fillings such as sisig and garlic wagyu beef, ube pandesals, mochi desserts, boba drinks, and more.”