“First and foremost, we are a local deli serving delicious hoagies,” Guy Bentley of Stan’s Deli tells Broadsheet. “If you want to dive in deeper, you totally can, but if you’re just going for your sandwich and you want to be oblivious to the whole crypto side of it, that’s totally fine.”

Bentley (Leonard’s House of Love, Leonardo’s Pizza Palace) got into Nouns DAO, an NFT project that grants owners of its digital assets the power to vote on projects funded by the community, during Covid lockdowns.

In the NFT world, nouns are characters of 32 x 32 pixels. A new noun is generated daily, and anyone is able to buy a noun through an online bidding system. Each time a noun is purchased, the money collected from the sale is put into a communal treasury, and the purchaser becomes part of the Nouns DAO. Members of the DAO are able to pitch ideas and the rest of the community votes to determine whether money should be allocated to those ideas.

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Bentley’s involvement in the community began as a hobby and turned into a physical store after he proposed a Melbourne sandwich shop called Nouns Deli, and it won a majority vote.

Now Nouns Deli has taken over the former Stan’s Deli shopfront off Glenferrie Road in Malvern. The shop was redesigned by Weekdays Design, pairing the bright pixel art style of Nouns DAO with a diner-esque fit-out of black and white chequerboard floors and barstool seating. Tying into the theme, there’s a rotating digital art display featuring creators like Nouns’ barista Lambie, who also happens to be an NFT artist.

Chef Prakasit “Noon” Sammasit, the former head chef at Leonard’s, oversees the menu. During his eight years at the ’70s-inspired log cabin and bar, he near-perfected the art of the Southern fried chicken burger. It appears on the menu here served with cheese, tarragon butter, lettuce, cucumber, pickles and jalapeno mayo.

There’s also a Cuban-style grilled pork and smoked ham sandwich, a Chicago-style roast deli beef and provolone hoagie, and a breakfast sandwich with pork and fennel sausage and a giant slab of perfectly square steamed egg that calls to mind a giant pixel.

To drink, in addition to canned drinks and Blume coffee, there’s freshly squeezed orange juice available via a self-service machine. Customers can also help themselves to self-serve soft serve in rotating flavours like Golden Gaytime, starting at $2 per 50 grams.

Nouns DAO is not Australia-specific. They’ve funded projects worldwide and Bentley hopes to eventually expand Nouns Deli’s presence overseas. But his next step is securing a location for a second Australian Nouns in Melbourne’s inner north. He also has plans to enable customers to soon be able to pay for their sandwiches with cryptocurrency – a natural progression for a business founded thanks to blockchain technology.

Nouns Deli
248b Glenferrie Road, Malvern

Hours:
Wed to Sun 9am–4pm

www.nounsdeli.com