Nusret Gökçe, aka Salt Bae, is the man behind the Nusr-Et restaurant chain
(Picture: Getty Images/handout)Good news for fans of internet memes and £680 steaks: Salt Bae is opening a brand new rooftop terrace.
The Knightsbridge branch of Nusr-Et — the startlingly expensive steak house helmed by the world’s most famous salt sprinkler, the butcher-turned-celebrity-chef Nusret Gökçe — will cut the ribbon on its 70-person al fresco space on June 28.
Open from midday until late into the evening, the terrace will serve its Instagram-famous meats from the chargrill downstairs, alongside a number of other dishes, from beef carpaccio and steak tartare to prawn tempura roll and salmon and avocado sushi, with the famous Turkish pastry, baklava, to finish.
It’s the latest expansion for a restaurant that caused quite the splash when it opened in central London back in September last year. Social media was flooded with pictures of well-heeled patrons tucking into gold-encrusted steaks - since discontinued - with many of them sharing pictures of their sky-high bills; in October, one such bill for a table of four went viral thanks to its £37,000 total.
And despite its apparent popularity, Nusr-Et was hit with a barrage of scathing reviews, both from newspapers — the Evening Standard’s Jimi Famurewa called it a “categorically bad restaurant” — and diners, with its ranking on TripAdvisor sinking as low as 17,418th out of 17,488 restaurants in London earlier this month.
It all stems from a video that first went viral in 2017. Gökçe, a butcher from eastern Turkey, was captured slicing a steak with great theatricality before sprinkling it with salt — a move that has now become his signature.
The video went viral — and earned him the moniker Salt Bae — but the entrepreneurial Gökçe was able to harness the new-found fame to help him open a series of restaurants around the globe, attracting world-famous footballers, A-list actors and even government ministers as his celebrity guests.
You can read more about the history of Salt Bae here, and check out our review of Nusr-Et in Knightsbridge here.
