Remember Salt Bae? The Turkish chef and restaurant owner who became inexplicably famous for sprinkling salt down his arm onto things?
Well now he’s got a rival. And he’s in Oldham. Takeaway spot The Bank Grill on Rochdale Road in Royton launched its social media pages while the country was still in lockdown, to showcase its food and get some interest going online.
Starting on Instagram, they moved over to TikTok last year, but since then, the takeaway’s chef has gone viral, mimicking Salt Bae’s salt sprinkling style in a series of TikTok videos. Dubbing himself ‘Salt Bahi’, he has appeared in a host of videos, sporting a pair of dark, round sunglasses and a turned-back baseball cap.
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Most of the more recent videos, which get views in the tens of thousands, feature Salt Bahi’s sprinkling antics, as well as staff scarfing down items from the menu. But it’s the latest video which has gone gangbusters.
Hauling in a staggering 12.8 million views on TikTok alone, and clearly resonating with restaurant and takeaway owners, it finds the crew at The Bank Grill scrubbing down all the grills and swabbing the surfaces at the end of a shift, with the caption ‘1 minute before closing’ written across the screen.
But then another order check comes in through the ticketing machine, to the horror of all the staff, who throw their implements down in disgust. Speaking to the Manchester Evening News, Bank Grill owner Tayyab Ali said: “We started doing it a couple years ago when we opened during Covid.
“We got the idea from Salt Bae, but instead of salt, what we’re using is sesame seeds, which is what goes over our dishes. We just did it to get some humour in.
“During Covid everyone was really, really down, so it was to make everyone smile a bit, and relate a bit to other business owners too, as you can see with our latest video.”
It’s made the takeaway’s chef, whose real name is being kept a mystery, something of a celebrity. “When customers come in, they recognise him and he puts the glasses on and changes character, and gives them a picture,” Ali goes on.
As for the name Salt Bahi, the variation is a nod to their Bangladeshi heritage. “Bahi means brother in Bengali,” he says. “If you want to refer to someone with respect, you call them Bahi, so it means Salt Brother.”
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