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What’s better than getting a pizza delivered at home during the time of the coronavirus pandemic? How about a pizza delivered by an ageless vampire family, complete with mysterious clues and puzzles to solve along with those slices?
That’s precisely the idea behind Vampire Pizza, a new at-home interactive food experience in Los Angeles that has been designed specifically for this current COVID-19 quarantine life. The idea is simple: a ghost kitchen pizza company partners with experiential artists and producers who are also stuck at home to create a one-of-a-kind character and clues-based game that gets delivered to a customer’s doorstep this weekend. It’s basically dinner and a (personal) show.
Vampire Pizza is the work of Josh Sugarman of Ravel and Ghost Pizza Kitchen on Melrose, and follows a vampire narrative, with pizzas originating from the secretive “Belle’s Family Kitchen.” Pizza and game kits come in two- or four-person packs, including some pretty snazzy packaging. A portion of proceeds from each sale goes towards the League of Experiential and Interactive Artists GoFundMe page; many of the artists who worked on Vampire Pizza have been laid off or furloughed, so the charity connection was obvious.
“We were all sitting around having our twelfth home-cooked meal in a row,” says Sugarman with a laugh, “when started to realize that we had this great group of people who can bring so many of the things that are essential to the restaurant experience right into peoples’ homes. This sense of story, discovery, surprise, all the things we used to take for granted at a good restaurant.”
As of now, only a few hundred kits or less are available for this weekend, starting Thursday and running through Sunday. If all goes well, Sugarman says the interactive at-home deliveries will continue, either with another tale from Belle’s Family Kitchen, or with a new storyline altogether. Reservation slots for Vampire Pizza are open now.
