Steve Cuozzo

Steve Cuozzo

Lifestyle

Salt Bae's underwhelming steakhouse is a ripoff

Nusr-Et may be this season’s most-talked-about restaurant, but be warned — it isn’t ready yet for prime time, no matter how many likes Salt Bae gets on Instagram.

There are a few great dishes. The place is eye-pleasing and comfy, with the same barbell-shape layout and high ceilings of predecessor China Grill (60 W. 53rd St.).

But last Sunday night, Nusr-Et was Public Rip-off No. 1. An up-and-mostly down meal for three, where each of us had just one cocktail and one glass of bad wine each, cost a whopping $521.45 — and left us craving a snack.

Tamara Beckwith
Tamara Beckwith

Turkish flavors were scarce. Nusret salad for $25 heaped days-old iceberg lettuce and mystery greens with tasteless goat cheese and a few walnuts, raisins and pomegranate seeds. Rubbing salt into the wound, high-school-grade french fries came to the table 20 minutes before the steak did, and turned cold.

Salt Bae is as swift with a knife as villainous “Turk” Solozzo in “The Godfather.” But his tableside, butcher’s blade attack on a $130, “mustard-marinated Ottoman steak” failed to sufficiently tenderize the shoe-leather-tough bone-in ribeye, which, for extra fun, was loaded with gruesome globs of fat.

Some dishes were much better but still overpriced. Saslik steak — boneless, spice- and milk-marinated tenderloin — was luscious, but $70 for a paltry number of strips that wouldn’t fill a coffee cup. Asado-roasted, spiced short ribs shared by a friendly neighboring table were just as good — but $110 for an order for two people? (Or $165 for three!)

Unlike any other steakhouse, they serve no bread unless you order a dish that happens to include it. Among them was a sirloin/tenderloin cheeseburger. It was thick and deep-flavored on a seeded bun, but for $30 I want more in the way of spuds than a handful of potato chips.

Tamara Beckwith

True, Nusr-Et has been open for only one week. But a place that’s been in the works for months, and floods Instagram with the chef’s Herculean salt-spewing skills, has yet to post a menu online. As of Monday, the phone reservation line didn’t work and there was no way to book online. Do they think it’s Rao’s?

I asked the waiter who chopped filet to a fine tartare ($30) and deftly worked in capers, shallots, cognac, ketchup, dijon mustard and chili sauce what the point was of dry-ice steam rising from a patch of thyme.

Nothing to do with the food. “It is just to set the atmosphere,” he explained.

But we want more substance with the smoke and salt — and dishes that not only sultans can afford.