Salt Bae is nowhere to be seen.
Patrons lunching at his new Midtown steakhouse, Nusr-Et, crane their necks for a glimpse of the social-media star, but he’s not in the building.
For the past two hours, the Turkish butcher has been sitting in a salon chair seven blocks away, tending to his silky black mane and fashioning it into his characteristic ponytail.
There are celebrity chefs, and then there’s Salt Bae. Last January, he shot to fame after a video of him sensually sprinkling salt over an enormous steak — his arm bent like a swan — went viral. In less than a month, his Instagram followers went from 950,000 to 3 million, propelling him from a somewhat well-known restaurateur in the Middle East to an international sensation.
Now, a year later, he has more than 10.7 million Instagram followers. Rihanna has worn a shirt with his face on it. His seasoning prowess was mimed by Justin Bieber and tweeted by Bruno Mars. Celebrities from DJ Khaled and Leonardo DiCaprio to Puff Daddy and, most recently, Dr. Oz have made the pilgrimage to his 13 restaurants around the globe.
“I saw at a Halloween party, everyone dressed like Salt Bae,” Bae says through a translator in the back of the restaurant. “I’ve become a brand.”
Salt Bae began his life as Nusret Gökçe, the son of a poor miner and one of five children in Eastern Turkey. He started working at a butcher shop when he was 13, cleaning the floors and counters.
“The sleeves on my coat were too long and my apron swept the floor. I had to stand on a water case to reach the counter,” he says.
Gökçe has long dreamed of coming to New York. When he was in his 20s, he was rejected for a work visa six times before finally winning approval for a three-month stint in NYC. He arrived in Manhattan with no English-speaking skills and barely any money, relying on a friend in the restaurant business, Kemal Binici, now his brand manager and translator, to help him get into a kitchen. He worked as a butcher in a restaurant he declines to name, as well as few shifts in one of Binici’s restaurants. It was there that his unique talents first began to surface.
“My kitchen staff was taking photos of him [cutting meat],” says Binici, also a native of Turkey, who has lived on the Upper West Side for the past 30 years. “He was going so fast. They had never seen anything like it. My butcher quit on the spot.”
Gökçe then spent a few months in Argentina before returning to Istanbul to open his own restaurant. In 2010, he debuted the first Nusr-Et in Istanbul. It was a meaty success, and restaurants across Turkey, in popular vacation spots such as Bodrum and Marmaris, soon followed, with Gökçe gaining some acclaim for his ability to slice through whole carcases as if they were butter. But it wasn’t until he started dramatically sprinkling his meat with salt that things really took off.
Last year, “I was at my restaurant in Dubai and had planned to make a video of my tomahawk steak,” he says. “I wanted it to look like salt was coming from the sky. It was my golden touch.”
‘I’ve become a brand.’
The recording of him seasoning the meat quickly went viral. As he drove from Dubai to Abu Dhabi, where he also has a restaurant, his phone started ringing off the hook.
“I was shocked,” he says. “All the sites were sharing the video … [it was] the birth of Salt Bae.”
He’s not sure who coined the name. “Bae” is slang for “significant other,” and salt is obviously the main ingredient of his success. But for all his allure, he’s nobody’s bae.
“I’m single,” he says, refuting rumors that he is married with children. “I’m working so hard I don’t have time for a girlfriend. She’d want dedication, to go shopping, go to the movies. She might be OK in the first week, but the demands would come in. I can’t tell her to come and wait at the restaurant for 20 hours.”
But while there’s no time for love in his life, his schedule is packed with vainer pursuits. He wakes up early every day, usually around 6 a.m., to work out for at least an hour — the better to show off his 8-pack abs in his signature tight, white T-shirts. (Restaurant manager Rahmi Aksoy offers up a video on his phone of Gökçe doing pullups on the backboard of a basketball hoop, then throwing a three-pointer from behind his back.)
As one might expect, his diet consists primarily of protein. He has seven egg whites for breakfast, while lunch is grilled meat with a salad. Dinner consists of more steak, with a side of vegetables.
‘I wanted it to look like salt was coming from the sky. It was my golden touch.’
Currently Gökçe lives in the Plaza Hotel, where he’ll stay until it’s time to move on to the next city to open up yet another restaurant. Though he’s not sure when that will be, he says he’ll be back: He’s currently negotiating a second New York City location, “somewhere with a hip crowd,” he says, which will serve primarily burgers, a $30 specialty at Nusr-Et made with his secret blend of beef.
“My new hometown is America,” says Gökçe, who opened a restaurant in Miami in November and also hopes to expand to Las Vegas and Los Angeles. “But I live with my work.”
As if to underscore his seriousness, Gökçe takes off his omnipresent $600 sunglasses — one of about 15 pairs he owns — for the first time.
“I spend a week in every restaurant,” he says. “The energy circles around. When the energy at one place comes down, that’s when I come back.”
When Salt Bae isn’t present, the servers at Nusr-Et try to mimic their boss’s panache, but patrons don’t even bother pulling out their phones to capture their tableside blowtorching of the restaurant’s meat sushi, or the hand-feeding of twirled spaghetti steak. This creates a problem: The more restaurants he opens — Dallas and London are also in the works — the fewer tables he can visit.
Gökçe insists the meat and the experience of dining at Nusr-Et, even without him there, are big-enough draws. But from the looks of the lunch crowd and their apparent disregard for the cost of their meal, it’s clear they want one thing: Salt Bae, tableside, holding that pose for just a second longer so they can get the angle right on their phones.
“I’m not a movie star, but I still get my photograph taken when I walk down the street, hundreds of times,” Gökçe says. “I never say no.”