Sea Salt Is Shaking up High-End Dining

At the Los Angeles Mediterranean restaurant Deme, head chef Blake Shailes has two dishes featuring salt.

        Robiee Ziegler
      




    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    


  



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Up there with caviar, truffles, and small-batch olive oil, a much humbler food item is joining the ranks as a gourmet delicacy: salt.

Chefs at high-end restaurants nationwide are increasingly showcasing various salts in their dishes and playing up their significance. Meanwhile, companies that sell your better-than-average table salt to restaurants, other retailers, and consumers report a marked rise in business over the last few years.

Mark Bitterman, a selmelier—otherwise known as a salt expert—likens luxury salt to a Rolex watch or Tiffany diamond.

“With salt, it’s the same things that make for a high-end product. Quality, scarcity, and the sexiness of the story we associate with it,” Bitterman says.

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According to Bitterman, good salts don’t have chemicals added to them and are made without heavy machinery or another industrial process.

“Those salts are made for large-scale applications such as packaged, canned, and frozen foods from big brands,” he says. “Good salt should have a certain mineral profile, crystal structure, and moisture content. It should be crunchy where you want crunch, punchy where you want punch, and mellow where you want mellowness.”

There are at least several hundred types of salt:  fleur de sel; black lava from places like Cyprus; Icelandic; greenhouse evaporated from Hawaii; extra-fine from Japan; and sel gris or gray salt from France, Bitterman says.In 2006, Bitterman founded the Meadow, an online salt retailer and boutique with four locations, including Portland, Oregon, and New York, and sells over 50 salt brands. The business has doubled in the last five years in terms of sales and revenue.

“When I started, good sea salt was an oddity. Now, it’s become a mainstream ingredient,” he says.

In another example of its growing appeal, the Atlanta-based online sea salt brand Beautiful Briny Sea saw US$1 million in sales in 2023, up from US$20,000 just a few years ago, says owner and founder Suzi Sheffield. She specializes in creating blends from Spanish sea salt, such as the best-selling French Picnic, a combination of salt, Dijon, garlic, and herbs de Provence.

    ![](https://img-cdn.gateio.im/social/moments-f48f9f6d03-67a8180901-8b7abd-d8d215)

The priciest salt may be amethyst bamboo from Korea, averaging about US$440 a pound, according to Mark Bitterman, a selmelier.

        Courtesy of Mark Bitterman

Sheffield’s clients include Turner Classic Movies and notable cooks such as Top Chef contestant Kevin Gillespie, who owns several restaurants in Atlanta. “I created a rosemary honey salt for the company to use on popcorn,” she says.

Another purveyor noticing the trend is Lior Lev Seccarz, who owns the online spice brand La Boite and offers more than a dozen sea salts. Seccarz sells about 5,000 pounds a year of salts today, compared with 200 pounds five years ago.

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These proprietors attribute the newfound popularity of an age-old ingredient to the pandemic when homebound consumers took up cooking as a hobby and elevated their meals with luxuries such as caviar and lobster. “Our business really took off then,” Sheffield says.

Another reason for the interest is news of the health benefits of quality salt. Pink Himalayan salt, for one, is reputed to control blood pressure and reduce inflammation.

The cost of a great salt also helps. A high-caliber variety doesn’t command the price points of truffles or caviar and is a comparatively affordable indulgence. However, it is far more expensive than humble table salt. The latter is around a dollar or two per pound, Bitterman says, while a French fleur de sel can run between US$10 and US$20 a pound.

Still, Bitterman says, “the cost per serving is just a few cents, which is partly why it’s gained more traction.”

The priciest salt may be amethyst bamboo from Korea, averaging about US$440 a pound, Bitterman says. Black truffle and flaky salts from Japan are also more expensive, coming in at around US$180 and US$86 a pound, respectively.

On the restaurant front, anecdotal evidence and the surge in sales from luxury salt brands to eateries suggests that chefs are incorporating the ingredient into their dishes more today than five or 10 years ago.

Bill Peet, the executive chef of Tavern on the Green in New York, has aimed to improve the standard of the cuisine at the historic restaurant since he took the helm of the kitchen almost nine years ago. “One of the ways I do that is by using good salt to finish dishes,” Peet says.

The restaurant’s burrata with hearth-roasted grape tomatoes and balsamic, for example, gets a sprinkle of Murray River pink salt from Australia, he says, which brightens the taste of the tomatoes. Roasted meats, such as the tomahawk ribeye for two, are topped with French sel gris.

“Salt is my exclamation point on a dish,” Peet says. Since these salts are an inexpensive way to add flavor, he doesn’t have to raise the price of the dishes the way he would with a truffle or caviar enhancement.

At the Los Angeles Mediterranean restaurant Deme, head chef Blake Shailes has two dishes featuring salt. His 45-day-dry-age Kerwee wagyu beef from Australia is complemented with red gum smoked salt, which he said adds an element of smokiness in addition to the charcoal cooking technique. For dessert, Deme offers a soft serve made with sesame caramel, toasted sesame seeds, and black volcanic salt from Cyprus—it gives the sweet ending a “beautiful mineral tone,” Shailes says.

Celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten uses Himalayan salt in the Pollen + Smoothie at abcV in the Flatiron District, which gives depth to the drink. At the aptly named Salt, a restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton in Amelia Island, Fla., chef Okan Kizilbayir and his team create infused salts such as parmesan truffle and chipotle for guests to buy and take home and highlight it in their cuisine.

Anyone skeptical about luxury salt being unpleasantly salty should banish their misperception, according to Peet. “You need a little of it for pop,” he says. “It’s going to make any food sing.”