Salt Bae Sued By Employees For Taking Tips From Waitstaff

It seems the grace with which Nusret Gökçe, better known as Salt Bae, distributes salt onto steak may not extend to the way he distributes wages to his employees.

In January, Melissa Compere, a server at Salt Bae's Miami restaurant "Nusr-et," filed a lawsuit against Gökçe, claiming that the restaurant illegally shared front-of-house tips with non-tipped workers, including coffee makers, sushi makers, and management, who do not rely on tips to make a living wage. Florida law states that if bills given at a restaurant include a separate line for tips, that money must go to servers whose salary is dependent on gratuities. Compere claimed that Nusr-et's method of splitting tips kept her from earning the federally-mandated minimum wage. As the suit waged on, Compere put forth a motion that all front-of-house employees she worked with at Nusr-et in the two years prior to the lawsuit, which she believes could number up to 200, should be eligible in the same suit.

On August 21st, the judge in the case ruled in favor of the motion, meaning a bad situation for Mr. Bae has gotten potentially 200x worse.

This is not the first time the Salt Bae has gotten into legal trouble, as front-of-house workers at Nusr-et's Manhattan location issued a similar claim. Before that, he had a feud with Senator Marco Rubio after Rubio criticized Gökçe for serving Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

On top of all this, on August 27th, Bloomberg reported that the owner of Salt Bae's restaurants, Turkish billionaire Ferit Sahenk, was planning an $890 million asset sale to cut debt. Sahenk hasn't stated that the Nusr-et restaurants are one of those assets up for sale, but perhaps we should take that information with a pinch of salt.