Kareem Rahma just wanted a slice of the pie, but he got burned in the process.
In 2018, the New York City comedian wanted to cash in on the success of Instagrammable food-inspired museums in the Big Apple with the immersive Museum of Pizza, but his pie-in-the-sky idea resulted in his “biggest financial failure” that was nearly a Fyre Festival-level catastrophe.
Rahma, who is the host of multiple popular online series like “Subway Takes” and “Keep the Meter Running,” lost thousands of dollars in the process of creating the wildly popular Brooklyn pop-up — whose visitors were none the wiser that the museum almost didn’t open.
“All I could think about legitimately was the New York Post headline that would run if, for whatever reason, it didn’t open or some other thing happened,” he told The Post.
“And so for me, it was, like, I promised people a pizza museum … and I will deliver, no pun intended, to them a pizza museum.”
While appearing as a guest on “The Downside Podcast” this week, Rahma recounted details of the harrowing tale, taking listeners back to the summer of 2018.
“I mean, at that point, everyone and their mom was starting a museum,” he told The Post, recalling the crop of food-influenced museums, like the Museum of Ice Cream, that had spawned in NYC.
“But I saw so many of them, and I was, like, ‘Oh, this seems like it’s a fairly easy thing to get up and running, and pizza’s probably the world’s favorite food. I bet people would come to see a pizza museum.’”
With a few clicks on the computer, Rahma created a SquareSpace site before even booking a location for the pop-up, listing his half-baked ideas for installations, like a cheese cave and cheese beach.
To his surprise, he sold a whopping $300,000 worth of tickets in just 24 hours, he claimed on the podcast.
“It went bonkers,” he told co-hosts Gianmarco Soresi and Russel Daniels.
But there was one huge problem: He didn’t have even a basic idea of what the museum would include, much less where it would be located.
“I didn’t even describe a concept — I just put the word ‘cheese’ before other words and ‘pizza’ before other words.”
Mere months away from launching his barely-on-paper-only installation, Rahma made a mad scramble to book artists and architects to build the experience, filing permits with the city and eventually locking down a venue for the pop-up downtown.
Things seemed easy as pie — until the landlord suddenly “ghosts” Rahma with mere weeks to spare, taking his $20,000 security deposit and leaving the entrepreneur scrambling to book another space.
His fate seemed bleak as things snowballed, “getting worse and worse and worse and worse,” he told The Post, fearing that he would taint his reputation if his brainchild were to fail despite his “good intentions.”
“I was just thinking about how I had to do it — like, that was the only option,” he recalled, adding that his nightmare was becoming a “Fyre Festival 2.”
He eventually stumbled across a vacant space in the William Vale Hotel in Brooklyn, forking over hundreds of thousands of dollars for the temporary lease and hemorrhaging cash to build lighting, shelvings and walls — all in the span of just two weeks.
Running on very little sleep and a dream, Rahma luckily completed the exhibition and opened right on schedule, although he compared his near-miss to the viral Willy Wonka disaster that occurred in Scotland earlier this year.
Despite seeming like a blockbuster event, the Museum of Pizza resulted in a financial loss of an estimated $200,000, admitted Rahma, who had created the pop-up under a now-defunct media company.
Vowing that he would “never do it again” by himself, he was even hospitalized due to the stress of the “traumatizing” venture, he told The Post.
In fact, it inspired him to change career paths entirely, quitting entrepreneurship to become a comedian.
“I think what I’ve learned is that ‘fake it ’til you make it’ is a good thing. You should fake it ’til you make it … you should dress for the job you want,” he said.
“I think that’s good advice, but in some contexts, I believe that that is not good advice — and I ended up using it in the wrong way.”
Looking back on it six years later, he can now say that it “was f–king awesome” to bring together a cohort of artists to “make a bunch of cool stuff based around the world’s favorite food” in what could be considered one of the world’s pizza capitals.
It certainly helps that he didn’t decimate his good name.
“Obviously, money’s important, but I think money comes and goes,” he said. “I think a reputation is something that can be tarnished forever, and it’s really hard to figure out how to fix it, so I would rather lose the $200,000 than to lose my reputation.”
And, if the fiasco that was Fyre Festival warrants a documentary or two, doesn’t the Museum of Pizza deserve some on-screen time, too?
“If anyone wants to make a movie about this, hit me up,” he quipped.
