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

Nusr-Et UK accounts show that the company behind the Knightsbridge steak joint made £2.3 million profit last year

Salt Bae at the Nusr-Et Steakhouse London, which enjoyed an extremely successful first four months of trading. Photo: Instagram

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

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 travails of the UK restaurant scene.

As long as the steakhouse received regular footfall, it was always going to be monumentally profitable.

Not long after it opened last year, social media users expressed shock after Nusr-Et customers were charged more than £1,800 ($2,300) for their meal ― including £44 for four Red Bull soft drinks and £630 for a gold-covered tomahawk steak.

There is also a gaping 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.

The golden steak is one of Salt Bae’s signature dishes – but it does not come cheap. Photo: Nusr-Et

Salt Bae, whose real name is Nusret Gokce, has more than 40 million Instagram followers and shot to fame on the back of serving gold-covered steaks accompanied by a seasoning method with more hip gyrations than an episode of Strictly Come Dancing.

He is not officially a part of Nusret UK, nor Dogus International, the company that owns the worldwide chain of Salt Bae eateries. This has not prevented the 39-year-old from accumulating a fortune, estimated to be in the region of $70 million.

His riches are a stark contrast to his humble upbringing in Turkey, where his father was a miner and Gokce, himself, 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 they say, is history.

Celebrities at Salt Bae restaurants - in pictures

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  Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro with Turkish celebrity chef Salt Bae. Mr Maduro retweeted the image to his 3.4 million Twitter followers. Photo: Twitter

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  Liverpool defender Virgil van Dijk with Salt Bae at his restaurant in Dubai. Photo: Instagram

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  Salt Bae is popular with stars such as Diddy and Naomi Campbell. Photo: Instagram

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  Renowned footballers Lionel Messi and Paul Pogba with Salt Bae at Nusr-Et Dubai. Photo: Instagram

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  Salt Bae has reserved Diego Maradona's favourite table at Nusr-Et Dubai 'for ever' in tribute to the former Argentina footballer. Photo: Instagram

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  Manchester United players Romelu Lukaku, Anthony Martial and Andreas Pereira with Salt Bae at Nusr-Et Dubai. Instagram/Nusr-Et

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  German footballer Shkodran Mustafi meets Salt Bae in Mykonos, Greece. Picture: Instagram