Small notes on cooking, travel, and the occasional rant about portion sizes. Mostly burgers. Sometimes buns. Occasionally opinions about kilograms.

THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT FAST-FOOD ETIQUETTE AFTER MOVING TO GERMANY

The first time I ordered at a McDonald’s in Berlin I did it in English and then froze up halfway through and switched to very bad German, because I suddenly felt that I was being rude. The person behind the counter was perfectly fine either way. That was embarrassment Number 1. There were others.

A WEEKEND PROJECT: BRIOCHE BUNS FROM SCRATCH

I started making my own brioche buns because a bag of decent buns at the nice bakery near me costs four euros for four, and I go through about a dozen a month. At some point I did the math and realized I could make better ones for about 90 cents worth of flour and eggs, if I was willing to spend a Saturday afternoon on it.

FIVE SMASH-BURGER SPOTS IN BERLIN WORTH THE S-BAHN RIDE

I’ll start with the disclaimer. I don’t trust “best of” lists on the internet. Half of them are ranked by how much the place paid for SEO, and the other half are by someone who’s only been to three burger places ever and is very excited about all of them. What follows is just five places I’ve been back to more than once, in no particular order.

HOW PORTION SIZES TRANSLATE ACROSS EUROPE

I spent a long weekend in Amsterdam last month, mostly eating. This is not a confession, it’s a research methodology. The thing that kept catching my eye was the menu board. Every burger place in the Netherlands seems to list the patty weight in grams, right there next to the price. 150g. 180g. 200g. It’s matter-of-fact, like listing the ABV on a beer. Nobody thinks this is strange. You can compare two burgers across two menus and know which one is bigger without asking.

WHY IT'S CALLED ROYALE WITH CHEESE

The Quarter Pounder doesn’t translate. That’s the short version. If you walk into a McDonald’s in Lyon or Milan or Hamburg and ask for a Quarter Pounder, the person at the counter will give you a blank look, because the name refers to a unit of weight that almost nobody on the continent uses. A quarter of a pound is 113 grams, which is not a number anyone here has any reason to carry in their head.