Congrats #SaltBae, you’re 2017’s first awesome meme

There were some huge stories this week on the internet. If people weren’t talking about Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s adorable bromance, or Donald Trump and Jim Acosta’s verbal ping-pong, they were probably talking about this Turkish chef.

His name is Nusret Gökçe, but his now 1.3-million Instagram followers and hoards of others across the web simply call him #SaltBae.

His popularity flared when an Instagram clip of him tenderly carving a steak earned him a ridiculous 3.81-million views in just four days. But while you’re probably saying “Sure, Selena Gomez can do that in a single day”, does she know how to sprinkle salt like this?

Ottoman steak 🔪

A video posted by nusr_et (@nusr_et) on Jan 7, 2017 at 2:44am PST

Yeah, we thought so.

According to Know Your Meme, Twitter user LoLa is credited with creating the name #SaltBae. Her tweet, featuring another video of Gökçe preparing a steak posted on 8 January, subsequently received around 3000 retweets.

#SaltBae, or Sprinkle Chef, became an internet celebrity this week after an Instagram video of his seasoning skills went viral

As a result of the above clip’s success, Gökçe’s other Instagram videos (which includes one of him massaging a cow) have also broken the one million view barrier on the social network.

#SaltBae quickly sprang up on image sharing site Imgur and 9GAG’s Instagram account, with many users commenting on his seasoning skills and adding their own captions onto his stills.

Small dump of Sprinkle Chef

While the meme itself seems to be something of a Success Kid successor — indicating triumph or a degree of situational swagger — we’ll have to wait and see if #SaltBae develops its own unique flavour.

You can follow Nusret Gökçe’s incredible journey on Instagram here.

Feature image: Nusret Gökçe via Instagram