By Andrew Chamings : sfgate – excerpt
SFGATE editor-at-large Andrew Chamings on why the Sho Club is wrong for San Francisco
San Francisco is 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 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.”…(more)
The PR guys are crazy to keep pitching these exclusive, expensive, reprehensively hideous projects in such as insensitive manner. The media is not sugar-coating it for them anymore. They are telling it like it is. We gag on vibrant, immersive experiential BS. Not to mention the activated sidewalks and other hyper techie speech that keep popping up in every pitch for parks that are not really parks because they lack grass and plants and trees. The are primarily poured concrete pathways. And for jolly’s they throw in some kooky tables and chairs and weed containers. The sad thing is that some people think this is good design. Pleasing to the eye. Who’s eye?
There is some idea of building a new condo on one of the piers, or in place of it that will have a bay front and inner bay pool. Clearly the architect and client are not considering low tide and just how bad that can smell. Low tide comes twice a day and the lower the lows the higher the highs.