I absolutely LOVE burgers!

Having lived in the US, I got very familiar with this delicious dish first-hand: from home-made, on the barbecue, under the Montana starry sky to some of the world’s best unknown burger joints. Eaten at the bar’s counter with a cold beer or on white linen table cloth, the burger was (almost) always mighty.

After I moved back to Europe, I continued the search for the perfect burger…and I have found none! The Brussels burger-scene left me with a sad, unaccomplished, melancholic feeling and always frustrated. Given, I have not tried all burger places in our fair city, but I had my share of burger-tears. The worst I had, no need to be calling names and pointing fingers sounds something like this:

* small white fluffy bun, sad thin dark-brown-grayish meat, one slice of bright-orange cheese…you know, the type where each slice comes wrapped in plastic (advertised as CHEDDAR, btw), onion slices from two days ago, one chunk of tomato with zero taste, some sour-vinegary cornishons, iceberg salad (yuck!) and, icing on the cake (or shall I say on the burger)(hold your breath for this one, I hope you’re sitting down): all drenched in…cocktail sauce. The horror!!!

On top of this, burgers get such a bad reputation, because we’ve been wired to associate burgers with the fast-food industry. And always with fries. Always. I’m not gonna go into the whole fast-foods discussion, I hope everyone who’s reading this text knows better. We don’t need this sort of crap in our lives, just as much as we don’t need a rotten onion for breakfast everyday (come to think about it, I’m actually inclined to raise my hand for that onion…).

So these are the rules of the perfect burger:

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