New York Times’ Pete Wells is the latest critic to opine on Salt Bae
The New York Times’ food critic is not known to hold back. When the knives come out for a restaurant that is overcharging, underperforming, or otherwise overreaching, Pete Wells does not mince words. So when he turned his attention to Salt Bae’s dinner theater of a steakhouse in Midtown, was it going to be a Guy Fieri-style takedown or a Señor Frog’s-style romp?
It turned out to be neither.
Rather than use his review column inches to dissect the steaks of Nusr-Et, Wells wrote a Critic’s Notebook analysis of “New York’s first true 21st-century restaurant.” Salt Bae, or Nusret Gökçe, has created a self-perpetuating cycle of meme to Instagram post to driving traffic to his now-month-old restaurant.
Wells describes a world where everything is about waiting to see Gökçe salt the meal. The cocktails are forgettable - “Smoked Negronis, poured from a smoke-filled wine decanter, tasted as if they’d been burned” - and nice-enough waiters are forced to attempt the now-iconic move during tableside steak tartare preparation: “He finished the job by sprinkling salt flakes from on high, in a pale imitation of the master’s style. Poor Marco, I thought. It must be like having to open for Beyoncé when the only song you know is ‘Single Ladies.’”
Despite enjoying the melt-in-your-mouth “spaghetti steak” and a barely seared lokum, Wells knows they are all here for one reason. And that reason hasn’t been able to wear a different outfit in more than a year.
“I wonder if he ever wishes he’d worn another outfit on the day ‘Ottoman Steak’ was filmed. It is too late to turn back now. Without the scoop neck and the mirrored shades there is no Salt Bae, and Salt Bae was what everybody in the room had come to see.”
Wells seems to keep his sense of humor over an internet meme restaurant (despite the $70 appetizers) where other reviewers have not. But perhaps you’d prefer to dine at one of the country’s best steakhouses.
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