The modern gourmet burger is a superfluous two fingers to a beautiful conception.
There you go. I said it. For me, the higher a burger is stacked the more wasteful it becomes. A double beef patty with bacon, onion rings, guacamole, tomato, cheese, Portobello mushroom and the rest becomes a pointless dish the moment you look for a knife and fork for assistance and start dismantling it into more friendly bite-sized pieces. We flatten, we halve, we attempt to pick up with our hands before we concede and watch all the afformentioned ingredients crumble on to the plate, only to seek solitude in cutlery. A complete and utter waste.
Burgers, or “hamburger sandwiches”, can be traced back to the 19th century in the US and grew in pooularity thanks to vendors such as White Castle, Big Boy and Kewpee before being catapulted onto the international scene by McDonald’s. The success of Maccy D’s is oft attributed to the “Speedee Service System” and principles associated with the modern fast-food restaurant, but I think it’s more down to simply making burgers that fit in your mouth.
To this day The Big Mac sets the roof on how tall McDonald’s will make a burger. A hand and mouthful admittedly, but not so big that you can’t possibly conceive a way to eat it unaided, unlike the whopper mega tower burgers finding their way on to menus today.
They can piss off for me. And that’s not to say that my eyes don’t pop out when I see a fully stacked heart attack-sized burger landing on my table, but the basic laws of nature dictate that whatever you’re seeing with your eyes does not check out with your mouth, nor your stomach for that matter, rendering the whole process pointless.
Rebut my anally retentive views below by all means, but burgers that need dissembling before consuming are a waste of our time. We need the basic ingredients done well. Not a basket of deep fried junk in a bun.
