If you are interested in cooking and haven’t spent the last year in a remote taiga village without access to the Internet, you probably know about Salt Bae. This nickname was given to Nusret Goekce, a Turkish chef who gained worldwide fame thanks to a single gesture. You, of course, have seen it: a man in dark glasses and a tight white T-shirt cuts the meat with confident movements, and then salts it in a special way - so that it first pours onto the back of the forearm, and from there it falls down. And if you managed to miss this epoch-making event, here it is:

It cannot be said that until January 2017, Nusret Goekce was completely unknown: after all, he has owned the Nusr-Et chain of meat restaurants for many years, including outside Turkey, but all this cannot be compared with that deafening the fame that fell upon him after the publication of that very video. 16 million views, 11 million subscribers, 600 thousand likes, 50 thousand comments and the title of the loudest culinary meme of the year are just a few of its echoes. Of course, not to monetize this fame would be simply stupid, so at the beginning of this year the Nusr-Et Steakhouse restaurant opened in New York, one of the capitals of world haute cuisine.

Will this discovery be the beginning of the end of the Salt Bae story?..

Such forecasts are not unfounded: critics of the main New York publications have already visited the restaurant, and their assessments are mostly negative. In the pages of newspapers and magazines, Nusr-Et is ostracized not so much for its high prices - a ribeye steak costs $100, a saddle of lamb - $250, and the cheapest main course, a burger, will cost thirty (add 18% as a service charge) - how much for food that is over-salted and simply tasteless. But to this restaurant, critics immediately corrected themselves, people come not for the food, but to watch Salt Bae personally salt your steak at your table - and many are willing to overpay for this experience.

And now to be honest: you don’t think that I decided to just tell you about a restaurant that the vast majority of us are unlikely to ever find ourselves in? And you are doing the right thing. Because Clayton Goose, one of the critics of Nusret Goekce's new restaurant, makes a conclusion so profound in the pages of New York's Time Out that I cannot deny myself the pleasure of citing it here in full:

Nusr-Et doesn't deserve the New York restaurant scene, but it's what we deserve. We all helped create this monster. We gave our data to Facebook for free so its engineers could feed us “meaningful interactions.” For years we have been posting photos on Instagram of stereotypical views, dishes and events, foaming at the mouth for new likes. In trying to communicate with each other, we have all become more simple and effortless.

In other words, everyone gets what they deserve, and we’re not just talking about New Yorkers, whom Nusret Goekce, who has already sold his second dozen restaurants, feeds bad and expensive steaks. It's about you and me too. For years now, restaurant reviewers (we don't have restaurant critics, so we'll call them reviewers) have complained about how often chefs at new restaurants try to play the Instagram card and create an impressive-looking dish that people will order only to photograph it, while the taste of such creations may leave much to be desired.

The latter, however, can hardly be considered a disadvantage: most people are unable to distinguish not only good from very good, but also good from bad, believing that a set of food phobias and addictions is a sense of taste. But the idea that it's time for people to learn to take responsibility for everything they do, including likes on Instagram or blindly following fashion trends, is worth thinking about and realizing in any case. This is exactly how the butterfly effect works: if you watch a stupid video on the Internet today, it’s quite possible that tomorrow you will have to put up with something much less pleasant.

PS: By the way, subscribe to my instagram: True, I haven’t yet become the meme of the year, but I won’t feed you over-salted steaks either.

When a person loves his job, you can feel it, you can see it between the lines of the video. Turkish chef Nusret Gökçe became a meme, the so-called “Sprinkle Chef”, thanks to this one video that we came across in social media feeds more than once.

Zozhnik translated for you an interview with the legendary chef:

Tell us who you are, where are you from?

I was born in 1983 in the city of Erzurum in Turkey, one of five sons of a miner. At the age of 5, my family moved to the city of Darıca. Due to busy work, I could only see my father once every 5 weeks.

Of all the children, there was only enough money for school for my youngest brother; I had to leave school in the 6th grade due to lack of money in the family.

How did your career begin?

I started working as an assistant at the Bostancı Bazaar market, I worked with 10 chefs at the same time and therefore I did not have a minute of rest. I didn’t rest, didn’t take days off, worked up to 18 hours a day.

And how did you get out of it? What happened next?

In 2007, a conceptual meat restaurant opened in İstinye Park. This inspired me and I began to reflect and think about how the best meat restaurants in other countries work. In Argentina, America, Japan they were the best and I wanted to visit all these countries.

But you have no education, you don’t speak other languages, how did you get the courage to do this?

One day one of my clients, a Frenchman, helped me make my dream come true. I collected all my savings and took out a loan (about $2000 in total) and went to Argentina. I traveled for 3 months, visited farms, butchers, restaurants, studied the experience.

What did you do after you returned to Turkey?

I returned to my old job and tried to show everything I learned on the trip, I made great meat dishes ('Ceviz', 'Kafes'). When I returned, my relationship with meat changed.

In 2010, my goal was to get to the USA, I applied for a visa many times, but I had no savings in the bank, property, or wife. I was rejected 4 times. After my trip to Argentina, I even got into the local newspapers and I had to show an article about myself at the consulate and they finally gave me a 3-month visa.

The menu I made in the US ended up being published in The New York Times. I worked in 4 of the best meat restaurants in New York without salary, just as an assistant, for the experience.

And you returned to your work in Turkey again?

My goal was to create my own establishment. And I had many offers. Mithat Erdem, my long-time friend, invested money, I invested my work and skills. He asked me what I wanted to name my restaurant, I wrote him ‘Nusret’ on paper, but it seemed to him that the letters “-et” were written separately. I also added “give me some money and I’ll buy you a bill counter so you can count our profits.” After 5-6 months of operation of the establishment, all debts were closed.

What does it feel like to achieve success?

When I realized that everything had worked out, I walked out onto the street in front of my restaurant and stared at the sign with my name on it. I just watched and was grateful to fate.

How has your life changed since then?

I once worked for $500 a month, now I have 400 employees and our company is growing. Foreigners (and many celebrities) specially fly to us on their business jets - just to try our food and this is a great happiness for me.

Internet memes, as a rule, do not live long, but they give their heroes the opportunity to make good money on the “virtual capital” they receive. Turkish chef Nusret Gökçe rose to fame in January 2017, when a short Twitter clip of him masterfully cutting up an ottoman steak and sprinkling it with salt made him the adoration of foodies around the world. A year later, he opens a new restaurant of his Nusr-Et chain in the most important city in the world - New York. I decided to remind readers who Salt Bae is and why he is so dear to us.

That first, most famous video was watched by 2.6 million people in 48 hours. A year later, Salt Bae, as his fans call him, has 268,000 followers on Twitter and almost 11 million on Instagram, he is perhaps Turkey's most famous culinary leader and is also running his first restaurant in New York.

Who is this anyway?

Nusret Gokce is a professional butcher, chef and restaurateur from Turkey. It has eight steakhouses and four burger joints under the Nusr-Et brand in several cities in Turkey, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Miami. He opened his first establishment in 2010, and after success on the Internet, he planned worldwide expansion. However, nothing has been heard yet about plans for Moscow.

Nusret is a Kurd by origin, born in 1983 in the town of Pashaly (Erzurum province in northern Turkey). In his own words, his education was limited to elementary school. “I grew up poor and from the age of 14 I worked 13 hours a day or more as a butcher's assistant. Now my life in this regard has not changed much - I still work from early morning until midnight,” the chef said in an interview with the American channel.

By the age of 27, Nusret had saved up money and opened his first restaurant in Istanbul - with only 8 tables and 10 employees. He now employs more than 600 people, including his four brothers. Opening a restaurant in New York is a matter of honor for Nusret. “New York is the steakhouse capital,” he says. “If I open a location in New York, then I have truly become an international brand.”

With America, however, not everything worked out right away for Nusret. In 2009, before opening his first restaurant, he decided to travel around the world and gain experience in meat-producing regions. He visited Argentina without problems, but the States refused him a visa several times. In the end, the guy managed to visit the “country of equal opportunities” on a three-month tourist visa.

Despite Gökçe’s young age, he already has nine children. “A man who doesn’t spend time with his family is not a real man,” he wrote under a photo with his offspring posted on Instagram.

Last year, Gökçe appeared in a cameo role in the television series Narcos - and, of course, demonstrated his signature method of throwing salt from a gracefully curved hand.

So is he Nusret or Nusr-et?

The chef's name means "With God's help" in Turkish. He inserted a hyphen into his trademark to emphasize the word et - “lamb”.

By the way, Salt Bae does not mean “salty handsome” at all, as many people think. The second word is an abbreviation and hashtag #saltbae stands for Salt Before Anyone Else (“Salt before anyone else”).

Who are his fans?

Still, there are 10.6 million of them, it’s impossible to list them all. But former Galatasaray striker Lukas Podolski, singer, tennis player and other celebrities were spotted in Gokce's establishments.

However, Gökçe is not a proud person; he willingly takes photographs with lesser celebrities.

And he achieved everything on his own?

There are some doubts about this. In the spring of 2017, the Turkish portal Uçankuş reported that Gökçe owes his popularity to a certain American PR firm that circulated a video from Twitter on social networks and paid for the appearance of world-class stars in restaurants. Even the budget allegedly allocated by Gekci for the campaign was announced: 7.5 million liras (about two million dollars). No evidence (or at least the names of the mysterious PR people) was provided, however.

The incredible number of views of Gökçe’s first video inspires certain suspicions: this is not always possible even for recognized stars - however, miracles, as we know, still happen. Indirect evidence in favor of the theory of paid fame may be the unusually large gap between the number of subscribers on Twitter and Instagram, but given the continued decline in the popularity of the former, this may only reflect the real state of affairs in the social networking market.

And yet - what is an “ottoman steak”?

The most interesting thing is that a steak with this name is not on the menu of Gokçi restaurants. And in cookbooks too.

“If your business is not on the Internet, then your business will soon cease to exist,” said even before the advent of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Today this maxim is no longer just a catchphrase. And in this regard, it does not matter whether Gökçe himself charmed potential clients, or whether specialists helped him in this - the result, as they say, is obvious.