Eating a Hamburger In Hamburg, Germany (2024)

It’s a chilly spring day in Hamburg, Germany, and my boyfriend and I have just left our hotel en route to a place called Burger Lounge, which touts itself as a “Real American Diner.” Immediately, we are confronted with a May Day protest filled with bearded hipsters and angry punks. Two protesters hold up a banner declaring “No! In the Name of Humanity We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America.” For a minute I’m embarrassed to be American, relieved that my leather jacket and black pants don’t scream that I’m an expat.

But the feeling passes, and 15 minutes of walking later, we are confronted with another banner, this one hanging outside a building and sending a quite different message. It is advertising the Charles Bronson burger, a cartoonishly perfect-looking hamburger ensconced in a bun and inexplicably sitting atop a flaming grill. We’ve arrived at our destination.

There is no more iconic American food than the hamburger, which serves as shorthand for American cuisine worldwide and certainly in Germany, where hamburgers are sometimes sold with American flags poking through the buns. The origins of the humble sandwich are murky, but according to Andrew F. Smith, author of Hamburger: A History, the hamburger’s main component — a ground beef patty — did originate in Hamburg.

In the 19th century, Hamburg was known for producing superb beef from its high-quality cows that grazed outside the city, says Smith. One of the most popular preparations of the beef was to chop it up, season it, and form it into patties, which were then usually grilled or fried. Germans have been eating these beef patties, called frikadellen or buletten, since the mid-19th century, according to Carolyn Taratko, a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

In the 1870s, the patty made its way to America, where it was dubbed a “Hamburg steak.” There was one main difference between the American and German versions: The American Hamburg steak was made from low-quality cuts of meat. First only sold in German restaurants, the Hamburg steak didn’t transition from German specialty to American dish until the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia. It soon became a popular cheap menu item at restaurants.

“‘Hamburg steak’ sounded much more elegant than ‘ground beef,’” Smith says. “It combined the cachet of foreignness with a word denoting a fine cut of quality beef.” Yet Hamburg steaks didn’t become a truly iconic American dish until somebody — who, exactly, is in debate — decided to place one of the ground-beef patties between two slices of bread in the early 1890s. Smith says that the hamburger steak sandwich’s beginnings can be traced to industrialization: Factory workers needed easy-to-eat food that they could munch on during their shifts, so lunch carts that sold sandwiches as well as the Hamburg steak proliferated, and somebody decided to combine the two.

Through the first years of the 20th century, hamburgers were considered poor people’s food, and the middle class was generally apprehensive; there was a pervasive idea that ground meat was spoiled. But then White Castle started selling burgers in 1921, using the dish to create the country’s first fast-food restaurant. By the 1930s, hamburgers were popular across America, and two decades later, in the 1950s, McDonald’s was king. The burger chain spread overseas, and in 1971 the golden arches arrived in Germany.

Burger Lounge is a paean to this era. Dotting the 19-year-old restaurant are the detritus of midcentury American pop culture: a statue of James Dean that has dipped too far into the uncanny valley, figurines of Laurel and Hardy perching on the shelves, Marilyn Monroe mugs for the camera in a triptych hanging on the wall. The black-and-white checkered tiles and chrome-plated red vinyl bar stools in front of the counter approximate a soda fountain, and Elvis’s “Don’t” plays on the speakers. Although the decor is midcentury, some of the burgers pay homage to more recent pop-culture figures, from Michael Jackson to Prince, whose burger is announced with a sign held by a giant anthropomorphized hamburger sculpture.

It’s jarring to see this schmaltzy vision of America less than an hour after the anti-American protest. How can the hatred of America’s politics exist in such close proximity to the love of American cuisine and popular culture?

We order the Rocky Balboa burger because this is our first meal of the day, and the Rocky comes adorned with a fried egg in addition to “homemade Beef, homemade Bread, homemade sauce, Cheddar Cheese” according to the mainly English-language menu. The burger arrives well done, the patty too perfect to be hand-pressed. It is unremarkable, somewhere well below Shake Shack quality-wise but above Denny’s. But as I chomp into the beef, while glancing at the sculpture of an outstretched arm grasping a basketball, I feel weirdly proud to be from the U.S. I’m surrounded by America’s most enduring export, its pop culture, in a restaurant that is celebrating it unironically. Although the burger doesn’t taste great, it looks right. With its fluffy sesame-seed bun, artificial orange cheese, and layer of lettuce, it is the burger emoji, actualized.

American fast food supposedly corrupted European food culture. McDonald’s was a symbol of everything Europe’s food scene was not: mass-produced, speedy, artificial. The American burger, in turn, began to represent these very qualities. Fast food was a sign of American cultural hegemony, and the burger was a dish that symbolized Americans’ lack of sophistication. In France, in 1999, McDonald’s was a site of violent protests against American policies. When McDonald’s planned to open a restaurant in Berlin’s alternative neighborhood of Kreuzberg a decade ago, left-wingers organized a protest against the American burger chain, spraying graffiti and creating an outcry. The question remains: For European diners, does the burger have to symbolize American imperialism? In Hamburg, Germany, the answer is decidedly no.

German burger restaurants have appropriated McDonald’s burgers and turned them into hipster dishes. The “New York Style” burger restaurant the Bird (located in Berlin and Hamburg) serves a Big Mac homage they call the Big Crack, described on its all-English Berlin menu as “Just like the burger in that other place but there is meat in it.” The protesters marching in Hamburg streets would find themselves at home at the Bird, where a framed poster of Donald Trump with “f*ck you puto” scrawled across his eyes and “Make America Hate Again” stamped in upper-case letters across the bottom immediately show the restaurant has a conflicted relationship with America.

While Burger Lounge invokes the imagined idyllic small-town America of the 1950s, the Bird brings you into a dark vision of today. Instead of celebrity namesakes, the burgers here are named after extremely problematic stereotypes Germans have of Americans: the Dumb Texan, the Drunk Ghetto, Da Woiks. There's a silver “Cheers Bitches” banner, and the servers are faux-hawked, neck-tattooed, and ear-plugged. We got a patty melt, medium rare, per the menu suggestion. It came out bright red in the middle, almost raw. Oozing with cheese and onions and sandwiched between rye bread, it was not the diner patty melt of the 1950s, but a more modern version. Made from freshly ground local German beef, slathered with homemade sauce, and served with hand-cut fries on the side, the farm-to-table-style burger (and the staff serving it) wouldn’t have been out of place in Brooklyn. The burger prices are more modern, too: they are double Burger Lounge’s.

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Does the German burger have to exist on the far side of one of these poles: uncritical nostalgia at the one end and disdainful irony at the other? Superhero-themed Hamburg joint Helden & Co demonstrates there can be a middle way.

Entering Helden & Co is like walking into what I imagine Chris Hardwick’s bedroom would look like, with a mural on the wall featuring Catwoman sitting at a table clutching a cheeseburger, and the Hulk doing the same, except looking angrier. Digital artwork of panels from Wonder Woman, Superman, Captain America, and the Hulk comics cover one wall, while a painting of a deconstructed burger is on the other. Burger Lounge and Helden & Co both present an American fantasy: one of a mythical past, the other a mythical universe.

Valentin Broer founded Helden & Co last year, inspired by his trips to New York City to visit his brother, who moved to the city in 2015. “I’m totally in love with the food in NYC and visited a lot of burger restaurants, delis, etc,” Broer says. “What I learned in New York is that the quality and size of the meat is very important.”

The Hulk burger is a love letter to American food. It is oversized, fatty, salty, and probably contains nearly 2,000 calories. It is the Big Mac on steroids. The burger patties are about double the size of the Big Mac’s, and instead of two “all beef patties,” it possesses three. In fact, the similarities to the Big Mac are no accident: Broer says that the sauce slathered on the Hulk was inspired by McDonald's famous special sauce.

Not every burger restaurant in Hamburg pays tribute to American pop culture. The restaurant Burgerlich wears its American influences lightly, without any Americana gracing its walls.

Burgerlich is sleek, modern, German. Customers order from iPad-like devices that emerge from their tables. Although the burgers have most of the components of a traditional American burger — beef patty, ketchup, lettuce, tomato, bun — they are not merely homages. The standard bun is brioche (although sesame is on offer). No American cheese graces the menu. There’s no better example of German-American cross-cultural exchange than Burgerlich’s Craut burger, an American-style burger topped with the classic German fermented cabbage slaw. The hamburger has returned home.

Burgerlich shows that Hamburg’s ground-beef patty has come full circle. German immigrants brought the patty to America in the 19th century, where it was placed on a bun. American soldiers returned the hamburger sandwich to Europe during World War I. And now, 100 years later, the hamburger is a staple dish in Hamburg restaurants. Hamburg has not only reclaimed its Americanized ground-beef patty, but it has also captured the imaginative spirit of American cuisine.

Hallie Lieberman, a Berlin-based food and sex writer, is the author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, which will be published in November by Pegasus Books.
Editor: Hillary Dixler