The Bored Ape Restaurant in LA Closed—But That’s Not the Whole Story

After two years, Los Angeles-based restaurant Bored & Hungry is closing its doors, with the branding being taken over by the Hungry DAO, co-founder Andy Nguyen said on Monday.

While Nguyen said goodbye to the Long Beach, Calif. location, Nguyen said reopening in the Los Angeles area was not out of the question.

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“Currently we are location hunting,” Nguyen told Decrypt. “It depends on what we find that makes sense to the business model.”

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As Nguyen explained, now that Hungry DAO acquired Bored & Hungry, the team can go back to focusing on other projects, adding that the team had been flying back and forth from Houston, TX—running Trill Burgers with Houston rap legend Bernard “Bun B” Freeman and Nick Scurfield—and Bored & Hungry.

“Bored & Hungry wasn’t supposed to be a long-term project,” Nguyen said. “And it was taking our resources away from our other work. The experiment took off a lot crazier than we ever expected.”

Bored & Hungry opened its first location in Long Beach on April 11, 2022. Decrypt was there as the line stretched down busy 7th Street in the iconic seaside town.

“Bored & Hungry is our way of utilizing the NFT [intellectual property] and creating this unique experience,” Bored & Hungry co-founder Kevin Seo told Decrypt at the time. “We’re bringing the Web3 community along to meet all the beautiful people of Long Beach.”

Bored & Hungry set itself apart from other local burger joints, allowing customers to purchase their meals with the Ethereum and Apecoin cryptocurrencies alongside traditional debit and credit cards.

Bored & Hungry was born out of one of the most well-known and popular brands in Web3, the Bored Ape Yacht Club. Holding a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, with a current floor price of 11.6 ETH—around $42,859 according to CoinGecko—comes with several perks, including being able to use the JPEG in personal business ventures.

With Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape images adorning the walls, the crypto faithful were ecstatic to see the JPEG collection jump into the real world.

“The supportive BAYC and Web3 community helped us break ground in becoming the first to utilize ownership of the digital IP asset and create a restaurant brand,” Nguyen said on Twitter on Monday. “The growth of the brand worldwide was very unexpected. Bored & Hungry opened up so many doors and relationships for me.”

The restaurant did, however, face an uphill battle in growing its clientele outside of Web3.

“Do you own any NFTs?” Decrypt asked a customer who stopped by to check out the location in 2022. “What’s that?” he responded.

Nguyen pointed out that the Bored & Hungry brand now has four locations, with three in the Philippines capital of Manila and another in Seoul, South Korea. Focusing on Asia and the Middle East, Nguyen said upcoming Bored & Hungry pop-ups include Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai.

While the original Bored & Hungry may be closed, Nguyen is bullish about the future of the brand in America.

“The home store may be gone, but stay tuned as Bored & Hungry will be announcing their new home in the U.S. soon!” Nguyen tweeted.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.