Gold, you might be thinking, a little too rich for my taste. Not so; the stuff has no flavour. Fortunately, the trifling inconvenience of this detail has never held chefs back. Remember Mr Z and his gold-wrapped sandwiches? No, no-one does. But where he failed, Salt Bae triumphed. Bae opened his Knightsbridge steakhouse Nusr-Et in 2021 with tomahawk tarted up with a gold-foil wrap — sort of beef in a body-con — which came in at £1,450. Bills within touching distance of £40,000 soon did the rounds and a profit of £7m was recorded within four months. London, a city of fools and their money.
Or perhaps not. There are indications our sense of cynicism remains: by summer of last year, the tomahawks had been taken off the menu (supply issues were blamed, but perhaps the, er, shine simply wore off). And now the price cuts are going further: last month, Bae introduced a three-course, £39 lunch menu. Now, maybe this is the cynicism talking, but when a restaurant lays on a (relative) bargain offering available seven days-a-week, I begin to wonder if they’re not exactly having to take a pronged fork to the hordes of hungry mouths demanding the à la carte.
The lunch offering is five starters, five mains and three puddings. “Choose one only,” the menu barks. But it’s not a bad choice, all told, although three of the starters are salads which, if you either have a life-threatening aversion to lettuce or perhaps just don’t fancy salad that day, rather runs the options down.
Hidden among the leaves are two other first courses: one is listed as a salmon tartare, which is somewhat an ambitious billing. It’s more of an avocado tartare, topped with appealing fresh salmon, then wrecked with ginger soy that tastes as though it comes from a bottle with a skull-and-crossbones on it. Did the person pouring have the morning-after shakes? It’s not quite a drowning in it, but it does feel like the school bully is flushing your head in a set of bogs with ginger-scented bleach in the cistern.
The Nusr-Et Special Sushi is similarly mislabelled (who wrote the menu? Do they know things? Anything?). Here, three “high grade” bits of wagyu striploin are mushed with melted parmesan and topped with a smattering of potato shards, the kind you’ll recognise from the very dregs of a last-orders, pub packet of crisps. And “high grade” that wagyu may be — tellingly, no actual rating is specified — but it tastes like the beef you’d find in a van outside the footy. Local league. Also, call me old-fashioned, but I always thought sushi called for a little rice in the mix. I dunno. To me, these seemed suspiciously like tiny, disgusting meatballs. If Salt Bae approved them himself, I can only wonder if those impossibly tight t-shirts are restricting the blood to his head.
A limp pile of sautéed mushrooms offered all the qualities of a packet of unblown balloons
Onto the steaks. Bae is easy to bash, but the general take has always been: look, it’s absurd — but the meat is pretty good. Apparently this no longer holds true. Never before has it occurred to me that beef could taste like water, and yet so it was. The kite-shaped filet was utterly dedicated to minimalism — the absolute reduction and lessening of everything, in this case flavour.
Bad, yes, but still preferable to the striploin steak, which had the iron tang of overcooked beef, as though the grill itself had been absorbed into the meat. The fat, not properly rendered, clung threateningly down one side. With it was a limp pile of sautéed mushrooms, offering all the qualities of a packet of unblown balloons. Of which, there are some benefits. Hate your kids? They’ll be too busy chewing to chat. In a bad relationship? There won’t be chance to argue.
We arrived, wheezing and with jaw cramp, to a pudding of traditional Turkish ice cream — your bog-standard vanilla blended with either wood glue or wallpaper paste, I couldn’t quite decipher which — and baklava. It offended; what else can I say? Walnuts with bad intentions were waiting, like the sprayed pellets of a shotgun blast.
Still, those who want to go, will. Arrive curious, and arrive with a spare change of clothes in a tightly-sealed bag. The whole place stinks of beef fat sizzling on the grill; you may not wish to. And even despite the reek, I can still see the temptation: it’s £39 and it’s Nusr-Et. A chance try one of London’s priciest spots on the cheap? It practically glistens with appeal. But what’s that line from The Merchant of Venice? I remember now. All that glitters is not gold.
