Salt Bae’s Nusr-Et London restaurant makes £7mn in four months

The London restaurant of Turkish chef Salt Bae made £7 million ($8.55m) in its first four months of trading, after opening in Knightsbridge in September last year, reported The National.

The takings were revealed in a financial report filed to the UK's Companies House by Nusret UK Limited, which owns the Nusr-Et Steakhouse in Knightsbridge.

The same report showed that Nusret UK made an overall profit of £2.3 million, an impressive figure given the wider UK restaurant scene.

The premise was that as long as the steakhouse received regular footfall, it was always going to be relatively profitable.

The restaurant has not been without controversy. Not long after it opened last year, social media users expressed shock after customers were charged more than £1,800 ($2,300) for their meal ― including £44 for four soft drinks and £630 for a gold-covered tomahawk steak.

There was criticism levelled at the disparity between the restaurant's income and its wages, with the revelation in November that staff at the west London steakhouse are paid less per hour than the cost of one of its bowls of crisps.

But not all outgoings are miserly with the financial report showing £300,000 was spent on “raw materials and consumables” from September 2021 to December 2021.

Salt Bae, whose real name is Nusret Gokce, has amassed more than 40 million Instagram followers and shot to fame on the back of serving gold-covered steaks accompanied by a seasoning method that included plenty unique movements.

Gokce is not officially a part of Nusret UK, nor Dogus International, the company that owns the worldwide chain of Salt Bae eateries.

However, that has not prevented the 39-year-old from accumulating a fortune, estimated to be in the region of $70 million.

He comes from humble beginnings in Turkey, where his father was a miner and Gokce a butcher's apprentice.

After leaving Turkey to work for free in restaurants in Argentina and the US, he returned to his homeland in 2010 and opened a restaurant in Istanbul. Four years later, he opened a restaurant in Dubai. The rest, as we can see it, is history.

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