Welcome to the NFT Restaurant Boom
Chefs like Tom Colicchio are minting NFT pizzas, recipes, and even limited-edition gin bottles. But is the rest of the food world along for the ride?
Just weeks before Christmas, with the restaurant industry reeling again from the omicron variant, chef Tom Colicchio was tweeting about penetrating the metaverse. In a series of tweets, he announced CHFTY Pizzas, a new NFT (non-fungible token) venture with Top Chef alum Spike Mendelsohn. The company’s website promises that owners of the NFTs — a “minting,” or release, of 8,888 unique pizza designs onto secure digital tokens — will enjoy “one-of-a-kind physical and virtual experiences” and “future integration into the expanding metaverse.” Colicchio’s pies are still in the virtual oven, but according to CHFTY’s Discord channel, a pre-sale will be offered to its “Slicelist” members on March 23 and to the public shortly thereafter with an initial supply of 2,777 NFTs priced at .07 ethereum each (at publication time, the equivalent of around $200). On paper, the total proceeds from these sales would surpass a half million dollars, which, any way you slice it, is a lot of extra cheese.
On a basic level, NFTs are a record on the blockchain, the rapidly expanding web of decentralized digital ledgers where cryptocurrency transactions are recorded. Each record is an irreplicable digital receipt that can be issued for almost anything. And in recent months, non-fungible tokens have emerged as a new way to define ownership in a digital world — buyers have been snapping up NFTs of everything from specific clips of NBA basketball dunks to silly renderings of bored apes. In simple terms, an NFT signifies that its holder has exclusive ownership of something in the virtual world — a digital image to place in their Twitter avatars, for example. (In this case, Colicchio’s pizza designs are like limited-edition digital trading cards where no two cards are exactly the same.)
