I don’t normally post reviews. But for this restaurant I’m going out of my way. Let’s start with the positive: We were a group of 6 (3 couples). Out of the 3 steaks me and my friends ordered, 2 were really delicious. The meat was soft and tender, it almost melted in the mouth. The third one (filet mignon) was delicious too, but burnt on the sides. The meat-cutting show in front of us was Instagram-worthy, which is most likely the whole concept of this place. Let’s get to the bad: The restaurant stinks and they have bad ventilation. It stinks because there’s fumes and smoke everywhere. They should invest in a better ventilation. The interior designer didn’t really try to create a pleasant high class atmosphere. The furniture looks very cheap, just look at the sofas. And the waiters create a super-hectic low-class atmosphere due to them running around. But here’s the biggest negative: My girlfriend ordered a white wine. The waiter brought her one, then took it away and asked “Oh you want the special?” And brought her and another girl the “special wine”. I didn’t really pay attention to this, as in a normal restaurant they don’t do what happened here. Later on the bill, half of the bill was 6 glasses of wine for 3600 AED (1000 USD). That’s 600 AED (163 USD) per glass. The waiter tricked my girlfriend. However, in the end it was my responsibility to check prices, which i didn’t do, partly because in this restaurant everything is so hectic that you don’t pay attention to details (plus, you normally don’t expect that you need to keep your guard up all the time in a restaurant. Especially because an expensive wine just doesn’t fit into this low-class restaurant hectic atmosphere. You feel like on a Turkish bazaar). Let’s continue with the positive: As a professional marketing and sales expert I have to say that I learned a lot from this place. First of all, they put the high ticket item menu in front of you, instead of the normal menu. You’ll find steaks there for 4500 AED (~ 1200 USD). I mean, not even a Wagyu steak in the most upperclass steakhouses costs that much. But that’s not my point. My point is that it’s a proven strategy to put super expensive items in front of a customer, so that the other expensive items don’t seem that expensive by comparison. On one hand I admire their audacity due to my profession, on the other hand, as a customer, I feel tricked and manipulated. You want a restaurant experience to be pleasant and you certainly don’t want to have you’re guards up all the time to check when they could trick you. And while the upsell-strategy with the comparatively hyper-expensive wine is a good one to increase short term profits, it’s a bad one to keep long-term customers who are sensitive to quality. However, due to Saltbae’s admirable social media strategy and the current Instagram-blogger-lifestyle, this restaurant will never run out of people who will want to have tried the Saltbae-experience at least once in their life.

My overall rating for the restaurant is 1 star (DO NOT GO HERE!), however, I’m giving it 2 stars because the quality of the meat is high. But no matter the quality of the meat, all the other factors don’t make it worth visiting this place. The overall strategy of this place is to fish the most amount of dollars from your pocket. This is not a bad thing per se, other places do the same thing successfully. But in other places you actually feel that you received a higher value for the higher prices you pay. Visiting Nusret was like paying the price of a new Porsche or Mercedes Benz while receiving the quality of a Fiat. Yes, it stills your hunger, but so does McDonalds or other lower-priced restaurants. The point of paying higher prices is to receive a higher quality experience. Nusret does not deliver this. Avoid at “all costs”.