Vittles : The Friday Slot

London Finds Itself

Vittles — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 13:53:37 GMT

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On Sunday 28th May, I will be hosting a panel for the British Library’s Food Season entitled ‘London Finds Itself’ about the dynamics of restaurant writing, map making, and the present and future of restaurant criticism. The theme of the talk was prompted not only by my experiences editing ‘London Feeds Itself’ but also recent developments in London’s restaurant writing ecosystem, the insurgent food writing of the Los Angeles based website LA Taco, as well as upcoming projects at Vittles. The following essay outlines some of my thinking for the talk and for these projects – if you are interested in coming, then you can buy tickets via the British Library’s website here.

London Finds Itself, by Jonathan Nunn

Map of London, by Anna Hodgson and Harry Darby

Telling someone where to go, rather than what to see, read or listen to, is the almost unique function of restaurant criticism. It shares this quality with one other branch of criticism: architecture; both are obsessed with maps that make the city findable in a Euclidian space of points and landmarks. In a review of the book Brutalist Paris that I recently wrote for Tribune, I note that only maps of brutalist buildings and diaspora restaurants have ‘the power of being able to draw out a certain kind of (white, middle-class, male) traveller from their home and into urban terrains they feel unfamiliar in.’ In this sense, Singburi and Trellick Tower are unlikely cousins.

Peckham Through The Ages

Vittles — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 09:24:17 GMT

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The Salt Bae Economy

Vittles — Fri, 15 Oct 2021 10:30:09 GMT

“Picasso is the biggest phenomenon of our time. It never existed [before] that a painter was able, with one movement of his hand - what necessarily didn't involve more than 10 seconds - that movement of the hand...transformed into gold.” ~ Elmyr de Hory

“This is a motion mark in color representing a cinematic sequence with a duration of 3 seconds approximately …. The scene describes the movements made by a chef while adding salt to a piece of meat located on a tray placed at the height of his waist. … Stills third, fourth, fifth and sixth recreate the movement of the fingers of the right hand of the chef at the time of sprinkling salt over the meat, with the peculiarity that the chef stands still with the exception of the fingers of his right hand, which progress the process of sprinkling salt, with the natural effect of opening his fingers in the last two frames, allowing the last remains of salt to fall over the piece of meat, which ends the motion.”

~ Salt Bae’s application to register his salt-sprinkling technique as an EU trademark

Look. I’ve been really, really trying not to write about Salt Bae because what is there to say that couldn’t just be said in a tweet? Yet, here I am, because I keep being distracted by all your bad takes. Salt Bae is charging too much. Salt Bae is tacky. You can get better steak at Hawksmoor. Salt Bae’s customers are idiots. Salt Bae’s customers are ‘Levantine’ (just say Arab next time, it’s quicker). Salt Bae is everything that’s wrong with restaurants. Salt Bae is everything that’s wrong with London.

The discourse is practically forcing me down the ‘Salt Bae is good, actually’ contrarian opinion piece path, but this would be to ignore the many things that are not good about his restaurants. The Dallas store allegedly left their suppliers in the lurch for unpaid invoices. In New York, waiters sued Salt Bae himself for stealing tips, and then five Turkish chefs, who Salt Bae had encouraged to come over to America from Istanbul, sued him for unpaid overtime. That everything about Salt Bae is inherently extremely funny does not mean that he isn’t also a business, and that this business is built on the labour of many uncredited people and potentially the abuse of that labour. But it is precisely this idea of trying to fit Salt Bae’s restaurants into the usual boxes of good or bad, as if you could give them a star rating, which is the problem. Whether Salt Bae’s food is good or bad is immaterial because he is changing what the purpose of the restaurant actually is.

It’s useful to go back to the start. Salt Bae was born Nusret Gökçe to a working-class Kurdish family in eastern Turkey. Like Jesus, very little is known of Gökçe between his birth and starting up his ministry, but he worked as a butcher for fifteen years, putting in the hours and rising up the ranks, before opening his first restaurant in Istanbul. Gökçe was already a successful and notorious restaurateur before he went viral in January 2017, but he was not yet Salt Bae. His Instagram presence mainly consisted of him doing basic bitch things like posing as Tony Montana, sitting in between the Churchill/Roosevelt statues on Old Bond Street and going to the Diana/Dodi memorial in Harrods to pay his respects. When you see him pose with footballers during this period, like Mesut Özil and Luka Modrić, it is Gökçe who looks starstruck and grateful; without his sunglasses on there is a sincerity in his eyes, a Salt Boy before Salt Bae.

The salting technique first appears on his Instagram feed in around 2016, mainly before the steaks are cooked, and is a clear attempt by Gökçe to come up with a signature gesture (before 2016, his gesture was posing with his blue knife next to beautiful women, blade turned downwards, puffing from a cigar, or pointing at the camera.) The chef Alain Passard, of the three-starred restaurant L’Arpege, has spoken of the need for chefs to invent new gestures when cooking, and Gökçe’s salting technique owes something to the performative seasoning from height that Marco Pierre White demonstrated in the late 80s, and something to the naturally theatrical nature of Turkish Restaurant Instagram, which includes Midefilozofu, Bugun Ney Emeliyiz and Burak Özdemir, who constantly one-up themselves in trying to find increasingly ludicrous ways of presenting and cooking meat.

Marco Pierre White: the salt bae of his time

The jump from low-level fame to global virality came on January 7th, 2017 when Bruno Mars screenshotted Gökçe’s Ottoman steak video in Dubai and posted it on Twitter, where someone quickly coined the term #saltbae. It is astonishing how quickly Gökçe grasped the opportunity of his virality. In the video he wears a tight white T-shirt and sunglasses, both of which had barely been seen together on his feed before. From that point onwards, this becomes all Gökçe wears. You almost never see his eyes on his feed again. He instinctively understood that, from this point onwards, he was no longer Gökçe but the character in the thirty eight seconds of video which had unintentionally gone viral – white T-shirt taut, eyes hidden under expensive shades. The feed became dedicated to the gesture: in a week there was a Salt Bae mural; in two weeks Rihanna was spotted wearing a Salt Bae t-shirt; in three weeks, Danny Welbeck celebrated a goal by doing the Salt Bae hand movement; and in a month, Leonardo di Caprio was eating at Nusr-et while Gökçe himself salted his meal.

This is the point where it should have stopped. Virality has a gnat’s lifespan – think bean dad, or feral hogs. I have a Harambe T-shirt in the Seinfeld font which I have only ever worn once, the day someone gave it to me as a birthday present. Yet the Salt Bae joke just kept going and going. New restaurants opened where the rich holidayed: Marmaris, Mykonos. A restaurant in New York opened, panned by the critics but, nevertheless, successful. He refused to give interviews, knowing that to be a meme you could not have a life outside the meme (it’s not a coincidence that the two things that have suggested an intellectual or political life outside the restaurant - posing as Castro and serving dinner to Maduro - are the two things that have got him into the most trouble.) It was at this time that perhaps the only perceptive thing ever written about Salt Bae was published, in GQ by the writer Joshua David Stein. In it, Stein writes of the gesture:

Salt Bae has done this many times. He will do this hundreds of times this night alone. The performance is both real and a reproduction. Salt Bae knows he is being held to the standard of his own 36-second video and its millions of views. He is a real-life meme.

Salt Bae’s astonishing longevity is owed to how, while his Instagram account becomes more ludicrous, with more moves, more intrigue, more celebs, the business itself never deviates from the promise of seeing the gesture in person exactly how you remember it, perfect and solemn. For all his success, Salt Bae is condemned to repeat the exact moment of his virality every evening.

Much of the discourse surrounding Salt Bae’s opening in London, more than four years after he went viral, has focused on What This Says About Society and where it is headed. In his amusing pan, the Evening Standard chief restaurant critic Jimi Famurewa writes that the food “really does make you wonder if Salt Bae isn’t really some slow-burn, performance art comment on the ills of capitalism and the credulousness of the general public in the internet age.” David Ellis, the food editor of the Evening Standard, with complete sincerity, took to The Leader podcast to call the huge bills being racked up by the likes of Gemma Collins “disgusting” and “dispiriting”, and asking ‘what it says about London’s diners’ when there is also “enormous food waste and food poverty in this country and around the world”, as if the two were linked, or as if you couldn’t say the same about any other high-end restaurant.

More perceptively, Hussein Kesvani, Phoebe Holly and Sirin Kale recently discussed on the podcast Ten Thousand Posts how the London outpost of Nusr-et is the final destination of the ‘experience economy’, where it is not the actual thing being sold that matters but the experience of that thing, and more crucially, evidence that you experienced that thing. In other words, you are not paying £630 for a tomahawk steak, but to participate in a worldwide joke by posting videos of Salt Bae doing the gesture, as well as all his other gestures, such as thrusting his knife into the meat, slowing down at the end with the uncanny rhythm of coitus; splaying the pinkness of the meat with a flick of the wrist; and feeding the diner the first bite from his knife. It is a new type of scam, for sure, but it is a scam that has the consent of everyone involved, a findommeing where your bank account is emptied but everyone leaves spent and satisfied.

Yet even though the forces that have made Salt Bae – social media, the ubiquity of phones, the ability for local fame to become global in an instant – are incredibly modern, and could have only really have happened in the last few years, to only see Salt Bae in terms of what is says about us now is to ignore his antecedents. That Salt Bae is also training to be an MMA fighter is not a mistake – there is a semi-serious theatricality about him that is strongly reminiscent of the great wrestlers. When Stone Cold Steve Austin gave his instantly memeable ‘Austin 3:16’ speech in 1996, he kicked off what was to become known as The Attitude Era of WWF, the golden age of modern wrestling. The speech, which includes the immortal line, “Talk about your Psalms, talk about John 3:16... Austin 3:16 says I just whipped your ass!”, became a selling point for the new regime. The storylines were ratcheted up, but the whole franchise relied on the same things being repeated again and again: Stone Cold would use the Austin 3:16 line, The Rock would call someone a jabroni, the same moves would happen over and over. The wrestlers essentially became the first real-life memes.

When critics try to pan Salt Bae they do not realise that he is a wrestler in a city of boxers. When they say that his steak isn’t as good as *insert steakhouse here*, or criticise his sourcing, or complain that gold leaf tastes like nothing, they sound like the nerds who would watch The Rock People’s Elbowing a pantsless Vince McMahon and conspiratorially whisper “it’s fake, you know”. Salt Bae knows precisely what his audience wants and is giving it to them many times over – the drama of his entrance, the pause to allow everyone to whip out their phones, the ‘Wow’ growled after a burger is cut in two. Nothing about him is unintentional and his surreal sense of humour is underrated – having a £50 cappuccino but making the Turkish tea free is a joke that is funnier than literally everything that has been written about him. Maybe, for some people, the joke is only good once, but every story, every picture on the ’gram, is a Hydra of virality, bringing in even more punters. You can only fool people once, but Salt Bae has almost everyone in the world left to fool.

Stone Cold: the salt bae of his time

His detractors also forget the reason why we used to come to restaurants. The review last week that actually captured the essence of Salt Bae was not any of the ones of his restaurant, or the many others which mentioned him sniffily, but Marina O’Loughlin’s review of Oslo Court. Oslo Court is maybe London’s most reviewed restaurant (pretty much every critic has done it once) because it allows the writer to meditate on the meaning of the restaurant, and the nature of this unchanging institution in a city that does nothing but change. “Why do people come here?” they wonder, tasting the mediocre food, before noting that restaurants are actually not about food at all, but about fantasy, to be taken somewhere else for an evening where things are precisely as you remember them, where steak Diane is on the menu, when Neil is recommending the best dessert on his trolley which he’s saved just for you. When one of those elements is missing, in this case Neil (the Salt Bae of his time), the joke can fall flat. Nusr-et is really nothing but Oslo Court for people with bigger pockets and shorter memories.

The question does remain about how all of this can be sustained. Until Salt Bae achieves bilocation, he cannot be in two places at once. Even though he hires impostor waiters, replicant-Salt Baes, the experience between the real thing and the fake is vast. It is clear though that London has found Salt Bae at his absolute pinnacle – his Insta Stories note that the London restaurant is outcompeting the next most profitable branch by 100%, and this week it posted the largest ever day-takings for any branch. Maybe we should really be asking what Salt Bae’s success says about London, that he can take one look at us and hike up his prices knowing that this is a city that loves to be scammed, that basically is a scam with fare zones. The London restaurant industry – one of the city’s biggest scams – runs on often dishonest PR, on artificial hype, on paid influencers, and yet Salt Bae has become the only thing to talk about without any real PR or paid flunkies at all. In just a couple of weeks, he has completely bamboozled an industry that was waiting for him to fail.

Maybe the real measure of Salt Bae is not the restaurant, but the irreality of London that he has exposed. The prices are so ludicrous they warp everything around them, like PSG buying Neymar for £198m starting a chain of events ending in Barcelona paying £105m for Philippe Coutinho. Restaurateurs, greedy for some of the Salt Bae shine, are advertising their food based on the fact they aren’t Nusr-et – whether it’s good-natured, like Flat Iron selling tomahawks for £6.30, or humourless, like Daniel Clifford calling Salt Bae ‘Mickey Mouse’. When Tom ‘I’m not mad’ Kerridge attempts to sell overpriced food on the basis it isn’t £630, he forgets Stalin’s dictum that one death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic. A £630 golden steak is funny, but £35 fish and chips is a pisstake.

Pablo Picasso: the salt bae of his time

We are all now living in the Salt Bae economy. If it’s not chefs, it’s restaurant owners trying to capitalise off him, and if it’s not them it’s podcasters and writers. The Evening Standard may have called Salt Bae ‘boring’ but they have published about ten thinkpieces on him in the last month to drive traffic to their website. They too are participants in the economy of Salt Bae, as am I, as are you, as is any person who is so interested in my opinion on Salt Bae that they have just paid to read this. I will be intently watching where the Salt Bae economy goes next. A hundred years ago that other master of the gesture, Pablo Picasso, as the great art forger Elmyr de Hory once said, transformed his own line drawings into gold. In that moment he created not just an inflated art market but also the possibility and demand for fakes and copies. Maybe this whole thing will die a death, but equally, maybe Salt Bae will simply never stop. Maybe the joke is one that never ends. Maybe Salt Bae will continue to turn his gestures into gold and in his wake a whole host of imitators, forgers and scammers will transform the way we eat forever, and finally, the Attitude Era of restaurants can commence.