De of all the cultural moments that took place in the UK throughout 2021, few were as lasting and divisive as the opening of the London restaurant of Salt Bae in September.
The Turkish chef, whose real name is Nusret Gokce, rose to stardom as a meme in 2017 when a video of him generously sprinkling salt across his forearm and onto a steak went viral. Today, he continues to adopt the idiosyncratic pose that made him famous both in his restaurants as part of a performance for patrons and anywhere he is photographed in public.
It is this hyper-awareness of what the Internet likes that has made Salt Bae be as successful, both as a public figure and in your catering business. It has been his life force for years, allowing him to grow beyond the limits of a meme in a way that no other real-life subject of a meme has been able to.
Gokce opened his first restaurant in Istanbul in 2010, after working in several restaurants in Argentina and the US to expand his experience in the sector. Your chain of luxury steakhouses, Nusr-et (a pun on your own name and the word “and”, Which means“ meat ”in Turkish), has since created almost 30 establishments and regularly receives high-level celebrities, politicians, athletes, etc. The brilliant guest list has bolstered the reputation of Nusr-et as a place to eat and be seen eating.
And yet how Salt Bae has been able to open restaurant after restaurant, in some of the most coveted places in the world – Dubai, Los Angeles, New York, London – despite constantly receiving negative reviews is something of a miracle. When his New York restaurant opened in 2018, critics described his giant steaks and chunks of meat as “tasteless and boring.”
Food critic Steve Cuozzo, at the New York Post, called the establishment a “scam,” and pointed out, quite wildly, that his steak was a “ribeye with bone, hard as shoe sole, which, to top it all, was full of horrifying globs of fat. ” Joshua David Stein of GQHe added that the menu was “absurdly expensive, even by New York steakhouse standards.”
This year, the entire London Twitter raged with the excessively expensive menu, in which everything was covered in gold. From ₤ 100-pound hamburgers to steaks Tomahawk from ₤ 850 (much more than this writer pays in monthly rent), Salt Bae He was widely criticized for putting huge prices on his dishes with a generous pinch of salt.
As if inviting public ridicule, some customers posted photos of their dinner receipts on Nusr-et, in Knightsbridge, showing the exorbitant amounts of money they had spent. A table of four revealed that their bill rose to an outrageous ₤ 37,000, which included the famous steak. Tomahawk, expensive side dishes like asparagus (₤ 18) and mashed potatoes (₤ 12), as well as bottles of wine and champagne that cost thousands of pounds.
The restaurant has also been affected by a number of negative reviews on Tripadvisor, where it now ranks 20,491 out of 23,811. Some of the more recent critics warn others not to dine there “not even for their photos on social media” and complain that the meat is served so raw that “the cow was still alive.”
One particularly (ahem) salty critic wrote that the food was an “insult to humanity”, adding: “The worst food, the worst service, we paid more than ₤ 1,800 for three people. Poor quality, smelly meat, small portions, I’d rather spend ₤ 50 at the local restaurant will be better [sic]! Never more. Stay away, it’s a death trap. “
Post after post (including The Independent) pounced on all the adverse attention the restaurant received from Salt Bae. During the weeks following its opening, countless opinion pieces, news, reviews and critiques were produced in every newspaper imaginable. A review by food critic Jimi Faruwera for the Evening Standard captured the experience quite aptly: “Any attempt to commit seriously to something so obviously non-serious is ultimately futile, like offering an honest musical criticism to a guy who plays the drums in trash cans on the corner of the street. Street”.
However, the London restaurant of Salt Bae It is still full, earning it praise from Manchester’s head of restoration Nikolas Opacic. Opacic described the celebrity chef as a “genius” despite having “insane prices.”
“Well done, you deserve all the credit,” he told the Evening Standard. “The people who complain are the ones who don’t even go to the restaurant. If people can afford it and want to experience it, let them do it. He’s a genius, if he can fill a restaurant with those prices. “
You can’t help but admire the magnetic pull of Salt Bae. Some have come to show respect for their ability to get money from the super-rich in ways that no government could ever. Not even the bad press can stop it; Arguably, the relentless content machine only serves to gain more attention, more reservations, more criticism.
All attention focused on Salt Bae Y Nusr-et It has nothing to do with food, and it never has. It’s about acting, theater that Salt Bae rides for your clients. It’s no wonder that once he left London, two months after opening the branch here, his restaurant’s ratings plummeted.
Now, he has opened another restaurant in Saudi Arabia, his 28th establishment. Once there, there is no doubt that he will continue cutting, sprinkling salt and posing for an even greater empire. And for that, we can only blame ourselves.
–
