![]() The space feels more like a polished pub, the kind of place that will probably look better once a few more beers have been spilled on the floor. Stepping inside, it’s not immediately clear that the bar they opened is meant for crypto heads. The menu lists seven hot dogs in regional styles. The Dirty Dog: whole grain mustard and fried shallot on a toasted poppy seed bun ($8). The bar houses a small recording studio, which will eventually be used to record podcast interviews about bitcoin in front of live audiences, the owners say. ![]() The partners want to use the space to host community events for locals who still believe in bitcoin, in spite of recent setbacks. Greg Proechel, a chef who trained at Eleven Madison Park and previously ran the kitchen at Manhattan’s New American restaurant Le Turtle, is handling the food. He teamed up with Peter Richardson and Greg Minasian, who used to run the Lower East Side’s Spreadhouse Cafe before it closed. Pacchia purchased the Formerly Crow’s space from owner Marshall Mintz, who was apparently ready to hand over the bar. Twitter and Reddit are just terrible places to learn because you’re thrown into a shitshow conversation.” “There’s a very dedicated and passionate group that doesn’t have that many places to go in New York City,” says co-owner Thomas Pacchia, a former director of blockchain incubation at Fidelity Investments. Earlier this month, I decided to join them.ĭrinks are well-priced for the neighborhood. Ironically, bitcoin is the only form of payment not accepted at the bar, but that hasn’t stopped crypto enthusiasts from turning out to show support. In some ways, Pubkey is on a similar quest: As rich people buy wildly expensive memberships to exclusive restaurants using cryptocurrency, Pubkey’s owners want to cast bitcoin as a force to bring people together. Most recently, it was home to a pub called Formerly Crow’s, which set out to create a safe zone from the area’s “fancy-like cocktail bars and frat boy hellholes.” The bar took over a basement-level space at 85 Washington Place, near Sixth Avenue, that’s been home to various dives popular with New York University students and local rabble-rousers over the last hundred years. My hope is that this context will help explain how I ended up at Pubkey, a self-described “bitcoin bar” that opened in Greenwich Village this fall. Now at Eater, I have a small dining budget, but most of what I cover somehow still seems to relate to either finance bros, food tech companies, or NFT restaurants. Long, long ago in a Midtown office far, far away, I used to work for Investopedia, a website about money and investing where, among other things, I wrote about blockchain, cryptocurrency, Elon Musk, and Apple’s quarterly earnings.
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