Just two years ago, Nusret Gokce had never had it so good. The most famous – and richest – butcher on the planet, he flitted round the world in his eight-seater private jet, cigar in hand, and counted Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Roger Federer and rapper Drake as friends.
The source of his vast wealth, a dining empire consisting of 31 restaurants across the globe, was flourishing and he was an internet phenomenon thanks to his distinctive salt-sprinkling technique.
It was first showcased in a 36-second clip titled ‘Ottoman Steak’ that went viral in 2017. Dressed in his now-iconic dark sunglasses, white T-shirt and black trousers, the then little-known Turkish restaurateur dramatically sliced through a boned steak before performing his signature flourish: grabbing a generous pinch of rock salt, raising his muscular arm high, and letting it cascade down his forearm on to the meat below.
When singer Bruno Mars tweeted the video, it had 2.4 million views overnight and within days, Gokce was reborn as the global meme ‘Salt Bae’.
He wasted no time cashing in on his fame. Within a year, the diminutive chef had opened the restaurant NusR-et in Miami, followed swiftly by two others: New York in 2018 and London in 2021.
As his profile rocketed he added outposts in Beverly Hills, Dallas, Las Vegas, Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Mykonos, Greece. A-listers flocked to meet him, including David Beckham, Jason Statham, Naomi Campbell, Snoop Dogg, Lionel Messi and Donald Trump Junior.
But it seems that Salt Bae’s 15 minutes of fame may be at an end. This month it emerged that his American empire is collapsing: His US business posted losses of £5.4million last year and, of his seven American steakhouses, just two remain – branches in Midtown Manhattan and Miami.
Yet in the eyes of many friends and former staff, his fall from grace was inevitable.
Since 2017, Nusret Gokce became the most famous – and richest – butcher on the planet, he flitted round the world in his eight-seater private jet with a cigar in hand
The celebrity chef, pictured with Lionel Messi, generated significant controversy following the men’s World Cup final in December, when he gatecrashed Argentina’s celebrations
When singer Bruno Mars tweeted a video of Gokce, it reached 2.4 million views overnight and within days and he was reborn as the global meme ‘Salt Bae’
Embittered ex-employees paint him as a ruthless and greedy boss, who demanded massages from female staff and charged obscene prices for mediocre food, while other critics have accused him of developing a ‘god complex’.
A high-profile friendship with disgraced rapper P Diddy only added to a sense that fame went to Gokce’s slickly ponytailed head.
And his restaurants have been dogged by a series of lawsuits.
The recipe for Gokce’s success was simple. NusR-et offered vulgar excess: extortionately priced meat with a side of showmanship.
On the menu at the opening of his swish London restaurant was a chargrilled tomahawk steak wrapped in 24-carat gold leaf priced at more than £700. There was also ‘meat spaghetti’ – thin strips of steak designed to be eaten like pasta – for £95 and a gold-leaf hamburger for £100. Desserts included a £50 baklava, again wrapped in gold.
Gokce, 42, gained a name for theatrically carving steaks with a sword before feeding a slice to his guest from the blade’s tip. Diners queued in the hope of being granted a few moments with him.
In reality, that experience was reserved for the lucky ones. He would spend the start of the week in Turkey, working the lunch service in his home city of Istanbul before dinner in Ankara.
He would then travel to Dubai, where he would spend Thursdays and Fridays, before returning to Istanbul on Saturday and then jetting to Miami on Sunday. By 2023, however, the first cracks started to appear in the international chain Gokce had created with such speed. He was facing several active lawsuits, with others quietly settled. In London, former staff described being forced to work gruelling hours for a boss who would fire people on the spot for the smallest infractions. And in New York, employees complained of unpaid overtime and accused managers of skimming their tips.
Gokce’s lawyer dismisses the accusations, saying: ‘High-profile restaurants and popular chefs are often targets for salacious and meritless claims.’
But The Mail on Sunday last week spoke to a former worker at one of his US restaurants whose testimony bore out previous complaints about Gokce’s behaviour.
A-listers have flocked to meet the chef, including football stars Lionel Messi and Paul Pogba
Speaking on condition of anonymity, she said: ‘It was very intense. They expected you to work very long hours and everything was extremely strict.
‘One time I got in trouble for drinking water. If you needed to go to the toilet, you needed to make it extremely quick.
‘That culture came from him. It was hostile and intimidating. He would make very strange requests, like getting employees to give him foot massages while the dinner service was underway.’
She added: ‘He’s very full of himself. He interviewed me personally and asked if I wanted to take a picture with him. He thought anyone would want a selfie or an autograph. A lot of time he’d be shooting content for his social media.
‘After almost every dinner shift there would be a woman waiting for him at the end of the day – often different girls.’
She also accused him of money-grabbing stunts. ‘He would raise the prices or add more gimmicky things,’ she said. ‘They decided to stick gold paper on to the steaks and sell them for hundreds of dollars more. Just because it was wrapped in this cheap edible gold foil. Business went slow after that photo of Salt Bae with Nicolas Maduro [the despotic ruler of Venezuela]. And they started getting more and more desperate for sales.’
Videos emerged in 2018 of Gokce and Maduro at NusR-et in Istanbul. The chef served the tyrant and his wife Cilia Flores before Gokce and Maduro smoked cigars and posed for photos.
As Venezuela was in the grip of a devastating food crisis, with millions struggling to afford basic goods let alone red meat, Gokce suffered a furious backlash when he posted clips of the encounter online to his millions of followers.
By the time he deleted them, the damage was done. Protests erupted outside his Miami restaurant and Senator Marco Rubio condemned him for ‘feeding a dictator while Venezuelans starved’.
Troubling claims of a toxic workplace culture first emerged in a 2021 court case in New York.
Embittered ex-employees paint him as a ruthless and greedy boss, who demanded massages from female staff and charged obscene prices for mediocre food
Former bartender Elizabeth Cruz filed a discrimination suit against Gokce, alleging she was demeaned on her first day at his Manhattan restaurant in 2019. According to her Supreme Court filing, a manager told her to go home and change into ‘short skirt, high heels and a revealing top’ after she arrived in the standard uniform of ‘long pants, a button-down shirt, an apron and a tie’.
Ms Cruz, from the Dominican Republic, said she was ‘degraded, offended, humiliated and sexually harassed’ by the remark.
The case dragged on until May 2023, when a judge ordered both parties to enter into private arbitration. The outcome of that has not been made public.
But while his restaurants have long been under fire from former staff, Gokce has faced growing scrutiny over company he keeps.
Videos from US rapper DJ Khaled’s birthday party in June 2017 show Gokce consorting with disgraced Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs.
In December 2017, Combs flew Gokce to his mansion to cook dinner for him, friends and family. ‘My brother Salt Bae,’ Diddy says, as the two men embrace and clink glasses. The chef was flown in again later that month for the rapper’s New Year’s Eve party in Miami.
In 2018, Combs and Gokce appeared together at a Dubai nightclub opening and in 2022, the music mogul was pictured at NusR-et in London.
On Instagram, Gokce gushed over his famous friend: ‘A serial entrepreneur, GOAT [greatest of all time] of music and entertainment industry, a genius and a true friend. Happy birthday king. Love you.’
Given what happened next, this soon looked like a colossal error of judgment.
Diddy’s girlfriend singer Cassie Ventura launched a bombshell lawsuit which became one of the most talked-about cases in America.
This month Diddy was jailed for four years for prostitution-related offences and handed a $500,000 fine after what the court heard was the ‘savage’ abuse of Cassie.
He was acquitted of more serious charges of sex trafficking and racketeering but prosecutors claimed women were drugged and secretly filmed having sex at Combs’ celebrity parties, often attended by global stars.
A high-profile friendship with disgraced rapper P Diddy only added to a sense that fame went to Gokce’s slickly ponytailed head
Diddy’s girlfriend singer Cassie Ventura, pictured, launched a bombshell lawsuit which became one of the most talked-about cases in America
It’s possible Gokce didn’t know about the impending legal storm when hanging out with Diddy but at the time of writing, the chef, who regularly uses Instagram and has 52 million followers, still counts Diddy’s as one of the 380 accounts he follows on the app.
Gokce also attracted controversy for his infamous appearance at the 2022 World Cup final in Qatar. As Argentina celebrated their victory, Gokce slipped past security and on to the pitch.
In a bizarre show of hubris, he posed for photos, grabbed players by the arm and kissed the World Cup trophy, despite strict FIFA rules allowing only winners, officials and heads of state to touch it.
At one point, he repeatedly tried to pull Lionel Messi into a selfie as the bewildered Argentine captain tried to celebrate with teammates.
The footage quickly went viral, sparking outrage among fans and officials. FIFA swiftly launched an investigation into how he gained access to the pitch and Gokce later apologised, insisting he had been ‘carried away by the excitement’.Asked why he did it, Gokce said: ‘There were two billion people watching the World Cup… how many people are speaking about me? Five billion. The whole world.’
Many might argue that these are the actions of a man swept up by a world he never grew up in.
Gokce is one of five children born to a miner and a housewife in the poor north-eastern Turkish city of Erzurum, where average incomes are around £6 a day.
Money was so tight that when he was growing up, Gokce wore ‘someone else’s clothes, two sizes too big’. By his own account, he left school early to help support the family, taking work in local meat shops where he first learned his butchery skills.
Determined to better himelf, in 2007 he obtained a bank loan and flew to Argentina – with its huge beef industry – to work in steakhouses and study how chefs there prepared and presented meat.
When he was satisfied he had picked up enough experience, he returned to Turkey in 2010 and opened his first restaurant in Istanbul, a tiny venture with just eight tables.
Today he has a net worth in the tens of millions, owns a £1million car collection including two Rolls-Royces worth at least £250,000 each, which he keeps in Dubai and Miami, and a speedboat for cruising Turkey’s Bosphorus. Oh, and there’s that private jet.
Gokce has also quietly built up an impressive property portfolio. In 2019, he bought the historic Macka Palas building in Istanbul for around £42.5million.
The property, which houses the Park Hyatt Istanbul hotel, includes a lavish penthouse featuring a rooftop pool, spa and views over the Bosphorus, which serves as Gokce’s personal residence.
Outside Turkey, Gokce is reported to have bought a £1.8million white-washed villa on the Greek island of Mykonos as a holiday home, later spending about £850,000 more on renovations.
His latest acquisition is a sprawling ‘residential and dining complex’ in a prime location on the Spanish island of Ibiza, complete with apartments and restaurants.
According to reports, work on the complex got under way in 2023 and is still unfinished.
But when completed it will include 51 residential units, 80 underground parking spaces and four gourmet restaurants – one of them, of course, an outpost of NusR-et.
One two-bedroom apartment in the complex, which went on sale early this year, has been listed at £1.5million.
No one could deny that the canny Gokce has made the most of his viral moment eight years ago.
But if it teaches us anything, it’s that, while all fame is fleeting, social media stardom is the most fickle of all.
