According to his lawyer, a Vietnamese court has sentenced a noodle vendor who gained notoriety for impersonating Salt Bae after the celebrity chef served a gold-leaf steak to a senior official.
In 2021, Peter Lam Bui published a parody video in which he impersonated Turkish chef Nusret Gokce, aka Salt Bae, who turned his meme fame into high-end restaurants by seasoning his noodle soup with herbs and going by the moniker "Green Onion Bae."
The viral video of the high-ranking Vietnamese official eating a steak at Gokce's Knightsbridge restaurant, however, was released after the first one.
Within days of posting his video, Lam found himself in trouble, so he recorded a police visit to his house in Danang, Vietnam's capital.
According to attorney Le Dinh Viet, the former activist, 39, was found guilty on Thursday by a Danang court of disseminating anti-state propaganda.
The posts and videos Lam had on his social media accounts were the basis for the charges against the defendant, according to Viet.
He continued, "There was nothing about the Salt Bae clip."
Lam refuted the accusations, claiming that all he had done was "express his personal viewpoint and exercise his right to free speech."
In addition, he received a four-year probationary period.
To Lam, the minister of public security of Vietnam, whose office keeps track of activists and monitors dissent, was caught on camera eating at the upscale Nusr-Et Steakhouse in Gokce before Lam released his parody video.
The restaurant serves up steaks wrapped in edible 24-carat gold leaf, reportedly costing more than $1,000, and the video sparked anger over the decadence on display while Vietnam struggled through the COVID pandemic.
During the same trip to London, To Lam also visited the grave of Karl Marx, the ideological father of communism.
Vietnam has strict curbs on freedom of expression, and the government moves swiftly to stamp out dissent and arrest critics, especially those who find an audience online. Independent media is banned.
To Lam, a member of the country's 16-strong politburo, has been public security minister since 2016 and has taken a hard line on human rights movements in the communist nation.
In April, Vietnam imprisoned Nguyen Lan Thang, a prominent journalist who documented protests and human rights violations, for six years.
A year earlier, high-profile dissident journalist Pham Doan Trang was sentenced to nine years behind bars.
They were all jailed on the same anti-state charge.
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