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A meme that made it

Nusret Gökçe is a 38-year-old Turkish restaurateur, entrepreneur and influencer, best known for his nickname on the internet since 2017: “Salt Bae”, due to his good looks and the odd way he sprinkled steaks with salt. Almost five years have passed since “Salt Bae” took the right turn on social networks, but contrary to almost all the characters who have become memes, it has not disappeared: it has built its own small empire.

In fact, Gökçe is about to open yet another restaurant – they should be quasi 30 – serving steaks covered in gold leaf to footballers, internationally acclaimed pop stars, successful entrepreneurs and many other celebrities. Gökçe has 40 million followers his instagram and 10 million su TikTok, an app that didn’t exist yet when he became famous for the dusting of salt he slipped down his forearms. In short, “Salt Bae” is a meme that made it.

But it is also something else. Gökçe and its activities are in fact at the center of various types of criticism: for what some say is the absurd quality / price ratio of what it offers, for its vain protagonism, however little it seems to have scruples in serving anyone and everywhere as long as there is money, for the very little transparency on how he manages his business and also for some events that suggest that working in one of his restaurants can be particularly unpleasant.

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According to the sparse biographical information known, Nusret Gökçe was born in 1983 in Erzurum, in eastern Turkey, in a family of Kurdish origins. His father was a miner, and around the age of 12 Gökçe left school to become an apprentice to a butcher. In 2010, after visiting South America and the United States, he opened his first restaurant and called it Nusr-et (“et” in Turkish means “meat”). Even before becoming famous on Instagram, he had time to open other restaurants and “steakhouses” both in Turkey and abroad: in 2014, to say, you open a restaurant in Dubai. The dynamics regarding this first phase of his entrepreneurial successes are not well known.

(Leon Neal/Getty Images)

After that, for the obscure reasons why certain things happen on the internet, and when he already had considerable fame at least in Turkey, a video he posted on Instagram on January 7, 2017 was seen in a few hours by a few million people. Several sites talked about it, memes started, the name “Salt Bae” spread and other videos of his were made. “People are ecstatic about a sexy chef who treats meat like a lover”, he wrote BuzzFeed. A couple of months later, the Post shared a photo of him voting for a constitutional referendum wanted by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to strengthen his power, holding the envelope as he did with the salt.

Leveraging his meme fame, Gökçe then opened restaurants in Miami, Beverly Hills, Mykonos, New York and London. And he served food to celebrities of all kinds: from Leonardo DiCaprio to Tommy Hilfiger, from Simone Biles to Roger Federer, from Andrea Bocelli to Nasser Al-Khelaïfi. From Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to a senior member of the delegation of the Vietnamese Communist Party, left for dinner with him – literally letting him feed a piece of meat covered in gold leaf, which can cost up to a thousand euros – after being in Glasgow for COP26 and after a visit to the London grave of Karl Marx. The video has disappeared from the social networks of Vietnam, and the delegation she might have gotten into trouble.

In all this, the restaurants of Gökçe and its exaggerations in treating and serving meat (after the salt, it offers with good consistency new oddities and various shows), generally very little appeal to food critics. Magazine Time Out he wrote that “his bills are too salty and his steaks are too salty.” It also seems, at least reading many comments and articles, that a good part of internet users are now bored with his character.

Gökçe and its activities have also faced criticism of another kind: for the lack of respect of certain regulations during the pandemic, due to problems with some former New York employees (solved with an extra-procedural agreement of over 200 thousand dollars), due to the exorbitant prices of some of its restaurants (in particular the London one) and why some time ago I search a chef to be hired for less than 15 euros an hour (less than the restaurant he asks for the side dishes).

Nevertheless, however, it seems that things continue to go well in Gökçe, who on Instagram often makes fun of those who criticize him (after the story of an overpriced menu of his, he put up a video in which he presented a receipt to a squirrel) and that just recently he left his London restaurant to open one in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

A recent article by Mel Magazine ha preso in giro Gokce writing that “the culture of 2021 has no patience for a very rich man with his idiosyncratic ways of cutting and serving”. That’s true up to a point, given the tens of millions of people who still follow him and, above all, considering that he continues to have customers. Often famous people, but especially people who want to be like famous people, really want to go to dinner from a meme and are willing to pay a lot of money for the experience of being in his restaurant, more than for what they will actually eat. .

Come he wrote Wired, Gökçe serves content rather than dishes. And he is so divisive that this is perhaps his strength because «those who dine with him around the world film themselves in the hope that those videos will say something about who they are; and those who make fun of those videos on social media or in articles likewise hope that doing so says something about who they are. ‘

The problem remains that sooner or later “Salt Bae” could really go out of style, and its restaurants find themselves serving outrageously expensive steaks without the current side dish of an upscale and appealing experience. The more restaurants he opens, the less chance there is of meeting him for customers. A restaurant from Salt Bae is one thing, a restaurant with “Salt Bae” another.

– Read also: Planet Hollywood success and downfall

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