THE ORIGINS
The Burglette®
origin story
A family project during the corona crisis.
It’s the end of
April 2020 and we’ve been in lockdown for
six weeks during the first corona wave. Rien ne va plus –literally. My daughter
Alina had just passed her school-leaving exams the year before and was looking
forward to a year of relaxing, doing casual work, travelling and partying.
Which sounded like an excellent plan – and then the pandemic hit.
For six long weeks, Alina couldn’t meet up with friends,
couldn’t go out, couldn’t travel and could only work occasionally – as a temp at a
bakery, after the seemingly so
secure job in catering went belly up. Alina became more frustrated as each day
went by, even more so in the days leading up to her birthday. There would be no
party with friends, no going out to a club, everything was rubbish and a
complete catastrophe.
So I tried to come up with something that might at least
make my daughter’s birthday a bit nicer and suggested, “Why don’t I cook for
you?” “Okay, but what are you going to make?” she asked. I immediately proposed
a range of several-course meals, but at the end of the day, they were “all
rubbish”.
Now, I’m quite a good hobby cook, if I do say so myself. I
am also someone who prefers traditional, regional cuisine to fast food. This
means I can count the number of times I’ve had burgers on two hands, and I had
never even considered making them. Not so my daughter: she loves burgers.
That’s when it hit me. “Alina, what
do you think about
making burgers on your birthday? Not the frozen kind from the supermarket – how
about we take the whole day and make everything ourselves? From the buns to the
sauces to vegetarian, vegan and beef patties.” “Now that is a great idea,” my
daughter said. So it looked as if I’d managed to save the day, at least sort
of.
No sooner said than done: three days before the big day, I
hunted down a number of recipes on the internet, especially for really good
buns and burger sauces. I’d already been given the recipe for a truly excellent
vegan patty from the head chef at our ROLLERCOASTERRESTAURANT® in Vienna; I
developed the recipes for the vegetarian and beef burger patties myself. By the
way, the recipes for the vegan and
vegetarian burgers are the same ones currently used at our Burglette®
restaurant.
On the
day before Alina’s birthday, we took our extremely
long shopping list to the supermarket, where I happened to find tiny, heart
shaped baking tins. Heart shaped buns sounded like the perfect thing for my
daughter’s birthday. That very same evening, we started baking the heart shaped
buns for our burgers; the recipe recommended making them the day before and
storing them in a cool place for 24 hours before serving.
The size of the heart shaped baking tins were ideal, and so
were the buns themselves. As we were planning to make and try lots of different
burgers, we wanted each burger to be on the smaller side so that we could eat
three or even four of them.
The next day finally dawned: Alina’s birthday. After a long brunch, we started preparing and making the burgers for our feast. We made the mixtures for the various burger patties, prepared the sauces and made a superb guacamole. After that, we prepared the other ingredients: tomatoes, different kinds of salad, cucumbers, gherkins, various cheeses, raw and roast onions, fried mushrooms and bacon – the list went on and on. We filled each ingredient in its own little glass dish and placed them all in the middle of our dining table; then we fried the vegan, vegetarian and beef patties. While they were cooking, we warmed up the buns in a combination steamer with a high level of added humidity to make sure the consistency of our buns was as close to the original as possible. Finally, we added our patties to the table, in a large, hot, cast-iron frying pan, as well as a hot bowl containing the heated buns – some of which we had dyed using food colouring.
My wife Katrin, Alina and I sat down to
eat. We took our
time, using the ingredients on the table to create the wildest burgers. For the
first time in my life, I felt that burgers can actually be a great meal, and an
incredibly fun one to boot. To spice things up a bit, why not get everyone at
the table to make a burger and put it on the plate in front of them. Then one
person rolls the dice, and everyone moves the plates one place around the table
for every number on the dice. This puts a playful spin on a new way of making
burgers: I’ll cook for you, even though I don’t know who I’m cooking for. In
other words, a burger roulette of sorts. Now imagine the same thing – but with
cocktails.
As we were sitting there, eating with gusto, I looked at
Katrin and Alina and said, “Do you realise that we are celebrating burgers in
an entirely new way? We are transforming burgers from fast food to slow food,
and I think this would be a great business concept.”
“It’s a bit like raclette,” said Katrin. “With a pinch of
roulette,” I answered. And thus the name for our concept was born: Burglette®.
Burglette® = raclette (burgers, desserts & cocktails)
& roulette
A little later on, we designed our own Burglette® dice.
And if we were to try and find something positive that came
out of the corona crisis, our Burglette® concept would certainly be worth a
mention:
without the corona crisis, there would be no Burglette®.
In the days after Alina’s birthday, I couldn’t stop thinking about the Burglette® concept. In my mind, a Burglette® turntable would take things to the next level. We could attach different sized dishes to a rotating base and put the buns in the middle, in a bowl or bread basket. And having a “first floor” above the buns would make sense, as this would be the perfect place for a hot pan with the various patties. No sooner said than done: I spent the next days in my workshop, where the first prototype of the Burglette® turntable was born.
The first Burglette® restaurant opened then on July 29, 2021 in
Nuremberg.
