Once I found myself starving on a dusty road somewhere in upstate New York. There was hardly any evidence of life in sight, save for the looming golden arches. It was the first – and last – time I ate at McDonalds. Don't get me wrong – I was living on a tight budget in a small town with a choice of two decent restaurants, so I ate ate plenty of pepperoni pizza and Buffallo chicken wings in the wee hours of the night, sucking hot chilly sauce off my fingers, so I woudn't stain my keyboard while writing some paper on the evils of capitalism, globalisation and The Third World. A greasy hamburger should have fit well into my diet of those days, except I couldn't take the smell of industrial refrigerators and fried-out oil.
Later that year, I returned to Bulgaria to find out the big yellow M had beat me to my destination. My niece, a pre-schooler at the time had a hard time making sense of her “American” aunt not wanting to set foot in what had become my niece's favourite food establishment, but she didn't need to ponder the issue too long, for the rest of the family were quite willing to take her mind off of it with weekend trips to the Shell station drive-though. Back then, the hamburger seemed invincible.
But times were changing. By the time the documentary Supersize Me effectively proved the Big Mac to be the most nutritious suicidal option available, the hamburger seemed set for a steady fall out of grace. But oh no, do not underestimate the army of foodies and greens, whose sophisticated taste buds and healthy living awareness in no way obstruct them from realising that if a food item has managed to capture the imagination (and appetite) of billions of people worldwide, there's something to it. It need not be dumped. The hamburger was simply due for a makeover.
There've been early signs for the reinvention of the hamburger. A couple of years ago, in a San Francisco Bay Area Restaurant by the name of Lalime's (if you're ever in Berkeley, Calif., check out this local gem), I had a kobe beef hamburger as an appetiser my friend and I ordered to share. Well, there wasn't much to share; the hamburger was slightly larger than a golf ball, but it did provide each of us with a sumptuous five-dollar bite of a heavenly snack. And then there were the organic burgers, the home-made burgers, burgers with portabello mushrooms and burgers with aioli.
But now it's official – the symbol of all-American fast food has gone chic and... well, French. It should come as no surprise that Paris, with its eternal crush on decadence, has taken it upon itself to revamp the burger into the epitome of gourmet by incorporating Gallic flourishes like cornichons, fleur de sel and fresh thyme. The New York Times reports that Frédérick Grasser-Hermé, a consulting chef at the Champs-Élysées boîte Black Calvados, developed a burger made with wagyu beef and seasoned with what she calls a black ketchup of blackberries and black currants. And Yannick Alléno who earned Le Maurice restaurant a third Michelin star last year, has added a thick, succulent burger at his casual restaurant, Le Dali. It costs 35 euros.
I don't know what is more surprising – chefs' about-face on burgers or patrons' enthusiastic response. The Times quotes the guest chef at a prestigious Parisian restaurant who says that there are days when a third of the guests order a burger, which is offered alongside Mediterranean-inspired dishes like sea bass with fennel confit and pistachios. And when a new guest chef arrives at the end of summer, he or she is bound by contract to keep the burger on the menu.
And the big M is showing some flexibility too. In addition to shedding a few pounds off its signature clown who has recently picked up sports and adding plenty of salads to its menu and nutrition advice to its corporate website, McDonals was quite willing forego the screaming yellow and settle on smaller, cleaner white-on-black branding, to fit in with the Prada and Luise Vuitton flagship stores in Milan's Galleria. When is Coca Cola going into the champaign business?
