Artist's rendering of the Sho restaurant atop San Francisco's Salesforce Park.

To the relief of absolutely no one, San Francisco is finally getting its first NFT-based restaurant and private club. And it’s being built right in the middle of a public park.

A flurry of recent press releases from an entity named the Sho Group — a “global experiential hospitality platform” — revealed the details of the ostentatious Japanese-themed restaurant and private club, to be built on San Francisco’s most ostentatious public space, Salesforce Park.

The restaurant, slated to open sometime next year, will include the members-only Sho Club Sky Lounge and will be perched atop the western end of Salesforce Park’s four-block stretch in a neighborhood no one from San Francisco is calling the East Cut.

The venture is led by Josh Sigel, a self-described “internationally recognized thought leader and innovator.” 

The wording around the club’s recent media blitz reads like a parody of Silicon Valley’s repellent buzzwordery.

"SHO Club is a member’s only NFT-based hospitality club providing exclusive access to immersive experiences and services around its flagship restaurant, SHO," reads the blurb.

What’s more galling than the repeated use of the terms “immersive” and “experiential” to describe an actual restaurant is the fact that, as the group’s website proudly proclaims, the astronomically expensive and exclusive eatery “is the only rooftop restaurant located on the Salesforce Transit Center’s roof.”

As downtown San Francisco suffers through soaring homelessness, vacant storefronts and a deadly fentanyl epidemic, the idea of its newest public space only providing food for those willing to spend exorbitant sums is brazen.

In a terrifying J.G. Ballard-like dystopian metaphor come to life, the private lounge, which will charge a top-tier membership fee of $300,000 a pop (yes, really, more on that later), will be situated 70 feet above surrounding homeless encampments.

In maybe a projection of the venture’s deficits, the most common word used in interviews and marketing blurbs surrounding the decidedly exclusionary club is “community.”

The word, adored in the crypto world, is used relentlessly in all of Sho marketing materials, as though if said enough times this ultra-bourgeois establishment under the bright lights of Salesforce Tower’s beaming helmet will somehow magically help the working man under Sauron’s gaze.

In an interview with Forbes promoting the restaurant launch, Sigel said, "For us, it's not about building a web3/NFT community. It's about building a community period and the value we place on creating and serving the communities that we operate in."

There may be no city in America with more naturally beautiful, welcoming communal public spaces than San Francisco. But Salesforce Park is not one of them.

The raised “urban oasis” and corporate High Line rip-off, which cost a cool $2.2 billion partially funded by the taxpayer, has come under considerable fire since its opening (and then closing, and then reopening) in 2018.

While technically a trip up the gondola or escalator to the park is open to anyone, it’s clear from the security guards, labeled as “ambassadors,” circling the the 4-block sanitized Teletubby garden, and the surveillance cameras looking over the winding walkways, that the unhoused are not particularly welcome in that “community.” A list of rules planted throughout the space make it clear: No wheeled conveyances. No sitting on railings. No tents. No lying down or sleeping on chairs or benches.

As Anna Weiner wrote in her 2019 New Yorker story "The Floating Utopia of Salesforce Park," the 5 acres that stretch over SoMa’s Natoma Street are "taxpayer-funded, corporately branded, suspended above the homeless."

In that piece, upon entering the gondola that provides access to the raised green space, the writer was met by a Salesforce "ambassador," an interaction that left architectural sociologist Galen Cranz alongside her remarking, "They don't want homeless, right?"

There are many confusing aspects to the opening of Sho, even down to whether construction has actually started on the building. In an email to SFGATE, a spokesperson for the group wrote, “The restaurant is already under construction.” However, a timeline on its website says construction will begin in September. A recent walk around the park revealed no sign of construction of the building that will one day loom over Natoma Street like a multi-story faux-Zen Lego temple. (The Transbay Joint Powers Authority told SFGATE over email that the building that will eventually become Sho is currently in a "cold shell" condition.)

Artist's rendering of the Sho restaurant atop San Francisco's Salesforce Park.

The food itself, of course, looks delicious. The downstairs dining room will be centered around a 12-by-3-foot sunken irori-style grill — a traditional style of cooking described as “Japanese farmhouse.” Sho claims this will be the only irori restaurant in the country. Upstairs, a California-style sushi bar will be helmed by acclaimed chef Shotaro Kamio of Berkeley’s Iyasare, after whom the entire venture is named. 

The announcement of chef Kamio being part of a restaurant on Salesforce Park was first made in 2019, with no mention of NFTs, as they hadn’t yet emerged into public consciousness. There was also no mention of the private members element. It’s unclear when the pivot was made.

Outside of the private members lounge, the restaurant will be open to the public. Sho told SFGATE over email that the number of seats and tables available to the public is not available at this time.

While the food sounds appetizing, the cost of joining Sho is not as easy to stomach.

Membership, which begins pre-sale in the next few weeks, is split into three tiers: Earth, Water and Fire. That lowest rung, the Earth tier, will be limited to an oddly specific 2,878 members, and cost a one-time fee of $7,500. For that, alongside their nonfungible token, members get access to the “private members entrance” and “front of the line access.” It’s a little baffling to know why one would need both.

The Water tier is limited to 377 individuals at a one-time fee of $15,000. Along with all the Earth membership perks, Water members can enjoy valet parking and a monthly curated omakase members dinner. The small print clarifies, in all seriousness, that “food & beverage [is] not included.”

If the intention of the top Fire tier level was to invoke Fyre Festival vibes, then Sho has succeeded.

For a mere $300,000 (plus a small $9,000 “transaction fee”), Fire tier members, of which there can only be 10, can enjoy “ownership-like benefits.” Why anyone would pay that much money to experience the stress of owning a restaurant in San Francisco, a notoriously painful and short-lived endeavor, is unclear.

Artist's rendering of the Sho restaurant atop San Francisco's Salesforce Park.

Fire members though can take advantage of “a once-in-a-lifetime highly curated trip to Japan that will provide unprecedented access to unique experiences and locations not available to the public.”  

Details are sparse and to promote this very private trip away from the proximity of the common man, the blurb shows an image of the iconic Chureito Pagoda overlooking Mount Fuji — a tourist destination very much open to the public that sees tens of thousands of visitors a year.

If you're wondering why the company is going to such lengths to promote a restaurant that doesn’t exist yet, it seems a fair guess that they need moneyed folks to buy up the NFTs so they can actually build the thing. Sho pushed back on this idea, telling SFGATE over email that “it is not reliant on the number of members signing up.”

Maybe as a result of the recent crash of the crypto and NFT industries, Sho seems to have given up on the NFT of it all already, at least when it comes to how they get paid. Their most recent press release states, “Recognizing the challenges that purchasing an NFT can present, SHO Group plans to support multiple purchasing options including the use of credit cards.”

Once you have handed over your cash, your membership “will be minted on the Ethereum blockchain. As an NFT, the SHO Club membership will be an asset to the holder, publicly verifiable, and can later be sold or transferred on the secondary market.”

The construction of an ultra-exclusive private lounge costing at minimum $7,500 to join, in a public park, built with taxpayer dollars, in the heart of the city, isn’t right. But sadly the news has been met mostly by a shrug, as if such a brazen example of wealth disparity is maybe now just to be expected in San Francisco.

When asked why a members-only lounge with restricted access is being built in a public park, the Transbay Joint Powers Authority told SFGATE the "reserved access for a fee is no different than fee-based special event rooms provided by many restaurants," adding that the new restaurant "will increase options for the public so that the park can continue to serve as the essential community space that it has become."

Maybe Sho will be a huge success; maybe it will go the way of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, an NFT which dropped in value from $2.9 million to $280 in a year; or maybe it will never be built.

The three membership cards on Sho’s site, representing the three tiers of entry, spin endlessly like a glitching gif. The promotional video looks like a cheap “Sims” spinoff, wherein restaurateurs eat around some uncanny valley fish roasting over a fire. 

The entire endeavor feels like an ugly vestige of 1980s Patrick Bateman excess combined with some Japanese fetishism, when eggshell business cards and bonsai trees were hip (to be square). It’s a smug celebration of the widening chasm of wealth disparity, planted in a time and a city that needs just the opposite.

SFGATE's Editor-at-Large Andrew Chamings is a British writer in San Francisco. Andrew has written for The Atlantic, Vice, SF Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, McSweeney's, The Bold Italic, Drowned in Sound and many other places. Andrew was formerly a Creative Executive at Westbrook Studios.