The world has woken up and smelt the gold leaf. What’s that? It has no smell? Right you are.
This week reports have emerged that London’s Nusr-Et steakhouse — opened in 2021 by Nusret Gökçe, better known as Salt-Bae — recorded a £5.4 million loss last year. It was on the cards: in September 2024, this paper revealed turnover at the site had dropped in 2023 by 31 per cent. Clearly, things have gone from bad to much, much worse.
The rot is global: five sites have shut internationally, while in the US, the company has revalued its US operations by £6.6 million, citing “exceptional expenses”.
But just like that gold leaf, which has no taste or smell, what Bae was selling was never what it seemed. The world’s best steaks? No chance. In a review of its £39 set menu — meant to be a bargain for somewhere that once shifted £1,450 steaks and £50 cappuccinos — I remarked that in a place that looks like a shiny service station, the only possible upside was that parents could use the place as a means to punish their irritating offspring. Meanwhile in his viral review, Jimi Famurewa called it a “vibeless business lounge, categorically a bad restaurant.”
It isn’t just snide critics, either: on Google, there are countless one-star ratings for the restaurant, many from this year. Disappointed Londoners are evidently turning their back on the place.
The wheels began to rattle early on. It wasn’t just the reviews. In 2023, the Daily Mail were already wondering if the place could go on, while by early 2024, the Standard reported the restaurant was turning off its heating to save bills. In February of last year, Josh Barrie published a piece called “Salt Bae, the hype king… is finished in London – I'm calling it.”
In his evisceration, Barrie pointed out that gold foil had long been taken off the menu, and that the celebrities who’d rushed in early doors had long been nowhere to be seen. Not that there were many to begin with: in London, first reports suggested the only name who had popped in was Gemma Collins.
The problem with the Salt Bae group — officially known as Nusr-Et, for Bae’s real name Nusret Gökçe — is that it’s always been built on false hype. It was 2017 when the video of the Turkish butcher trickling salt down his forearm went viral, for which we have Bruno Mars to blame. It could have just been a meme of some tight-shirted man with a bad moustache and ugly medallion, but then Twitter user @lolalissaa christened him: “So this is #saltbae.” Suddenly we had a name for the man waving his wrist and curling his lip. This does not seem to me solid grounds for a worldwide operation.
Now, after years of rumours, the cold hard cash proves it: London is very much out of love with the meme come to life. If it feels inevitable, that’s because it is. The baffling thing is why anyone goes to a restaurant built on internet hysteria in the first place. But, with fame so often overriding quality, they did here, at least for a while. And so I have been writing about the vacuous, Lamborghini’d world of Salt Bae for eight years now, to document this demand. Christ. Salt Bae might be losing millions, but out of the pair of us, I still think he’s had the better deal.
Salt Bae: London branch of Nusr-et appears on Deliveroo, with £680 steaks in tow
Aragawa: How good can a £760 steak really be?
Salt Bae, the hype king who brought us the £1400 steak, is finished in London – I'm calling it
The £39 Salt Bae lunch reviewed: There are benefits, for instance if you hate your kids
