Salt Bae, Stop Falsifying Food! (and Pay Your Staff)

Atlantic to Adriatic
8 min readNov 4, 2021

“We live in a society…”

Starting as such would be both an appropriate beginning and a laughable meme. I’m not much one for dwelling on the issues of the day, or engaging in hot-takes and armchair ‘activism’ but food is the one thing that can get me as fired up as a good stove. Anyone who has been spending time on Reddit lately will have noticed that r/antiwork has been hitting the front page a lot. I get very sucked into these threads with the perverse thrill that comes from being an observer, a self-employed non-American one even, to the horrors of the American job market. It is thoroughly dystopian. There are trends there I see in my own society taken to their logical conclusions. I frequently encounter nightmare after nightmare listed on that page, some even were becoming all too familiar back home. Still, I somehow wish I could dive into those workplaces and tell so many of those bosses where to stick it. I suppose that accounts for half of the popularity of this subreddit; an exercise in collective empathy and wish fulfilment. Perhaps even the sigh of the oppressed creature. Few can do such things in the real world. And, with those trapped in wage slavery, boy do I empathise.

It was one particular post that caught my attention though…

Funny enough unlike most of r/antiwork this job is in London!

There are several reasons for this. First, I can’t believe this Z-list poser is still in the news. I have never encountered anyone in a culinary profession who irks me as much as this moron. And this post succinctly explains exactly why. As I said, first of all, he is a flashy poser with no credentials and a list of restaurant reviews that make this painfully obvious. Many are even listed on Wikipedia. Imagine having your incompetence prominently featured in your encyclopaedia entry on the 4th most visited website on the internet. Christ!

Second, this outrageous pay he is offering in spite of his own unearned fortune; amassed from the overpriced and gimmicky steakhouse empire, Nusr-et, named vaingloriously after himself. Of course, the margins in the industry are notably brutal. The idea of paying $16 an hour to a chef seems just about fine in the grand scheme of things (in a restaurant with normal prices). Though if one wishes to attract and retain talent, in a place like London, it probably actually isn’t. Oh, and that whole potentially leaving your team in working poverty thing might be important too. Industry-wide mistreatment of staff is a whole other drum to beat. (Including such alleged injustices as tip theft, something that may be familiar to Salt Bae (henceforth Nusret Gökçe, as I refuse to use this ridiculous name)) This is all far out of my scope to fix! Personally, the lack of respect and remuneration is a key factor that keeps me out of the professional kitchen. I can happily cook for myself now and I feel valued and respected in my work. This was my personal choice. I won’t berate the professional maniacs who thrive on that industry but I won’t be there with them.

My real issue, however, is the price of the damn steak. How did it come to be so expensive?

Smoke and (Guilded) Mirrors

Anyone with the merest experience of capitalism will know the answer immediately — branding. Branding is, of course, the exercise of artificially making something worth what you want to be paid for it. Nusret Gökçe is a brand and nothing more. One that seasons his own arm and guilds his steak in flavourless gold foil. For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of eating culinary gold let me elaborate: you are eating a non-reactive (dit. ‘tasteless’) piece of metal. You don’t eat aluminium foil, so why eat gold foil?

Let’s hear it: branding.

More specifically, the falsification of food that I am talking about here. If you eat this kind of trash you don’t love food, you love money. More specifically, you love showing how much of it you have. And luckily you can do that so easily nowadays it hurts. You can make a nice video of you watching a man throw salt on his hairy elbow over a tasty piece of poorly cooked gristle. Not only can you do that, but you can also share it with the world so they can see exactly where you can afford to burn your cash. This whole enterprise is what many people might call ‘a bloody grift.’ After all, $2000 for a steak is arbitrary. High-grade Wagyu is expensive — perhaps $200 per pound. A Tomahawk steak (a flashy french-trimmed presentation of rib-eye, with a large amount of superfluous bone attached) is perhaps 2lbs. Calculating the food cost gives us $400. A place serving exclusively grilled meat can probably get that food cost down. Selling for 5 times the food cost, when the restaurant norm is 3 times would be dishonest practice. But of course! We have forgotten the flavourless, purposeless addition of real gold. But when paying someone $2.66 to spend 10 minutes cooking the thing, we can really wonder just how arbitrary this price is. So, wouldn’t you love to know where your money is going? Pointless fucking theatre, that’s where.

I want you to relax and open your memories to a more innocent time. We are going back to 2005 — a quaint and remote past, where people still told you not to put your real name as your username and even less to court strangers from the internet with photos of your leisure locations. We are going even further though, far from the metropolis that keeps this branch of Nusr-et afloat, to the wilds of Inverness.

For some, food was always about theatre. And food that is primarily theatre is trying too hard. Food is food. Food is about flavour. Food is an experience quite removed from theatre, in fact. Food, actually, is not even an art. It isn’t a photo, nor a painting, nor even a sculpture. What creating food is, is a craft. Food fulfils a function in a way that art does not (and should not.) Food is nourishing, delicious and often social. The theatre may be social, but it is never delicious nor nourishing and usually only entertaining in the same way as a circus.

With that in mind, we can go back and visit La Riviera with Gordon Ramsay. This was a time when Kitchen Nightmares was a particularly British phenomenon. Gordon was actually shown providing a lot of actionable advice and training in this version of the show. It is, obviously, still reality TV but it is in the exact realm of entertainment, education, and empowerment that I believe really symbolises Gordon Ramsay’s most worthy TV work.

The chef of this episode is Loïc Lefebvre. A chef in love with the performance of his own cuisine. And herein lies the tension of the episode. Throughout, Chef Loïc does not want to admit this. He does not want to simplify. He doesn’t want to engage with the philistine local clientele. He does not want to compromise his ‘vision.’ He is a little arrogant. But, as a talented cook and first-time head chef from a Michelin background, is that a surprise?

Yes and no. The older chef tries to get his message through to Loïc. Gordon lived the exact experience the episode is trying to remedy; it always amazes me that Loïc is so resistant. But he is in love with the theatre. It takes a 50-minute episode, Ramsay, and TWO Michelin Inspectors to convince Loïc that he must bring food to the forefront of his restaurant, something that seems quite obvious to us mere mortals. Thank God, there was no Instagram at this time! We are currently being treated to an endless pastiche of #foodporn, a fictionalisation of the eating experience exactly the way porn is a fictionalisation of the sex experience — a form of voyeurism. One that certainly has its place but one that constantly threatens to overwhelm our experience of eating. We may have been treated to that from Loïc if Instagram had been the flavour of the day in 2005. Yet, thankfully, it was not! Loïc Lefebvre, chef of L’Atelier du Peintre, listened. He is now an even more accomplished chef who went on to win his desired Michelin star. His restaurant doesn’t appear to maintain a large Social Media presence. The food must surely speak for itself. Indeed, Loïc was one of the great successes of Kitchen Nightmares, though he was always a great cook. Stripping the theatre from food is crucial. It can be added only when the food already speaks for itself and even then it should be added with forethought, insight and care. Almost the opposite of someone we have already met.

So, where does this leave Nusret Gökçe? Nowhere.

Mummified in his own gold wrap and games. He is just a particularly vile manifestation of one particular problem we are facing with food. It is such a pity. He is from Turkey, a nation that is home to some of the finest grilled meat dishes on the whole earth. His culture is packed with examples of what he should be doing but does not. It is mindblowing that this man maintains any standing in the culinary world. Such is the power of branding. Such is the power of treating food as an experience removed from (and I mean in both senses of the word) taste; as theatre, as sculpture, as painting. As I said, food is none of these. And while Instagram is a fantastic place to experience food, to grow and learn, to be inspired, it is also a place full of fakery and cynicism. Scrolling through the feed, so much of it just looks like the trickery photographers use to push fake food. This is not where the reality should come from, however; not from the painter, not from the actor. Throwing your salt around, instead of your weight, more than doubles your worth, it seems.

But we are not so blind to this kind of stunt and honest eating has been known since time immemorial. We can even sum it all up with an old cliché: the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Don’t forget that more than ‘branding’ your food, eating your food is the reality. Without eating one ends up with an equivalent to a photoshoot for a burger advert, something that is not real — a cold bun of disappointment, full of glue and scaffolding and nail polish. Think of this article as the Dogme 95 of food. A naturalistic exercise in removing pointless branding and creating honest, real and delicious content on Social Media. Telling the truth is great branding, after all. I suppose this is just to say that even though I have only recently decided to revive my food writing, it couldn’t come at a better time to remind me to stay faithful to the food.

Who am I to criticise this multimillionaire restauranteur with his 40M followers? No one really, just someone with basically no followers who believes that food should be honest. Nonetheless, I am someone who can cook a steak for a great price and not have it described as “tough with globs of fat and gristle, and severely lacking in flavor.”

So if you love posting your food online, be a real cook. Be like Loïc Lefebvre, don’t be like everybody’s favourite culinary actor and staff shafter… And if you are a restaurant pay your staff and don’t allegedly steal their tips. Simple.

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Atlantic to Adriatic
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