Salt Bae Nusr-Et steakhouse chain sued for unpaid overtime pay

Christy Reuter, a lawyer for Gokce, had no immediate comment but said she would notify him about CNBC’s request for one.

Gokce, a flamboyant native of Turkey, several years ago became the internet meme sensation known as Salt Bae for his sensuously shot videos.

Gokce’s oft-viewed Instagram and Twitter posts frequently feature him in sunglasses and a tight, white shirt, expertly butchering beef with a long, sharp knife, and then drizzling salt down onto steaks, the crystals at times hitting his forearm, which he twists into the shape of a swan.

“All of my feelings are coming from inside of the meat down to when I put the salt onto the meat,” Gokce once told NBC News.

In addition to locations in New York, Miami and Dallas, his steak chain now has restaurants in Istanbul, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Mykonos and several other cities.

While getting the chance to gawk at Salt Bae himself in action if Gokce happens to be in the restaurant that night, diners fork over big bucks for the eatery’s offerings.

A kale salad is one of the least expensive appetizers on the menu in New York, at $25 a pop.

The prices escalate from there, with a thick-cut wagyu ribeye steak on offer for $100 and the “Saltbae Tomahawk” wagyu — a “high marbled, mustard marinated bone in ribeye” — costing $275 apiece.

Toss in sauteed mushrooms with that, and it will cost you 15 bucks extra.

The five men who sued the chain and Gokce himself Monday claimed they were shorted some of the proceeds of those whopping dinner bills, after getting hired in 2018 and 2019 on the heels of his online fame.

Four of the men, Ersel Ok, Muhammet Yilmaz, Emre Isler and Eyyup Yeniceri, live in Queens, New York, while the fifth, Ibrahim Gecit, lives in Miami.

Their suit says that all five men worked for the chain until the last two weeks of July.

All of them are Turkish citizens “recruited by Defendants to relocate to the United States to work at Defendants’ internationally renowned restaurants” as grillers, the suit says.

After arriving in the U.S., the suit says, the men were assigned “to work grueling hours in non-managerial positions at the restaurants” despite being classified by the chain as exempt workers, who were paid a flat weekly salary.

So-called non-exempt workers, such as cooks, are entitled to overtime pay equal to 1.5 times their hourly wage after working 40 hours in a single week.

The suit says that the most any of the men were paid was a weekly salary of $1,125.

The complaint says the men regularly worked at least 72…