The largest and most famous Italian restaurant in Belgium, Restaurant Osteria Romania is now accepting payments in cryptocurrency from its customers. The food company has announced that moving forward, customers will now be able to pay for their meals in Bitcoin ($BTC), Ethereum ($ETH), and Litecoin ($LTC).
These three are the first step the company will take into cryptocurrency as they hope to accept more diverse cryptocurrencies as the market improves. The trend of purchasing food with cryptocurrency was set on 22nd May 2010 when the first meal was paid for using crypto. A BTC miner bought two Papa John’s pizzas using Bitcoin and since then, May 22 every year is celebrated as Pizza Day.
According to the current trend, many of the world’s largest food retailers accept cryptocurrency as payment for meals. These big food brands include Subway which started accepting Bitcoin for food payments in 2013, Burger King started accepting cryptocurrency in 2019, and Starbucks in 2020.
Many other companies have announced that they are thinking about adopting that line and accepting crypto for food payments as it has become a very popular method of payment for almost anything in the world today.
Currently, even some delivery applications that specialize in food delivery are also accepting cryptocurrency as payments for food deliveries. It is now almost as if very soon if food production/retail companies don’t accept cryptocurrency as payment for service, they might lose a serious level of patronage.
As cryptocurrency is not as widely accepted in Belgium as in other parts of the world, the manager of Osteria Romania, La Vecchia believes that the restaurant is the first of its kind in the country to accept cryptocurrency as payment.
The owner admitted that in the restaurant’s ten years of existence, the modes of payment have drastically evolved. In the beginning, the restaurant 15-40% of customers paid for their meals in cash but that percentage has dwindled to 3% as many of the customers now favor credit or debit cards.
The newly inclusive cryptocurrency option is the latest financial solution that will hopefully dominate the company’s payment methods in the coming years. La Vecchia is also really not expecting the majority of customers to suddenly start paying in crypto as he said that if 3% pay I’m cryptocurrency, it’s already a success as these things take time.
He sees it as an extra service he is offering to his customers and hopes that the idea will be sold to a huge majority of his customer base in the long run.
Featured image source: Finance Magnates
