The Dutch love Bruce Springsteen. Well the ones I’ve met at Bruce Springsteen concerts do. You know what else The Dutch love, potentially more than Bruce?
Mayonnaise.
I recently found myself in Amsterdam, and as has become the norm, I set out to find some of the best burgers in the capital of The Netherlands. In ended up in Burgermeester, which is a burger chain in Amsterdam. Except there’s three of them. Holland is really small.
Burgermeester translates to ‘Burger Mayor’ (mayoR with an ‘r’, not mayo) and according to a few Dutch Bruce Buds, it’s adored by the locals in the city.
I went for the ‘Biefburger Royaal’. I liked the sound of the ‘truffel ei’. I didn’t know what ‘ei’ was and I made what I thought was an educated guess at ‘truffel’. I imagined a patty bursting with delicious flavour, with truffles transported all the way from the Tuscan countryside of Italy. How luxurious. And how foolish of me. As I unwrapped my burger, expecting to be wafted with a delicious aroma, I discovered that I’d been very seriously misled. There was no truffle. What I found instead was a massive dollop of white gooey stuff smeared onto my burger patty. Closer examination revealed that it was in fact egg mayonnaise. And egg mayonnaise does not smell like truffles.
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| What.The.Hell |
Egg mayonnaise is an acquired taste at the best of times, but to put it on a menu and wait for an oblivious English speaking burger lover to order it is a bit cruel. The stinky egg mayonnaise fell out everywhere, all over my lap, and detracted from any other flavour in the burger. Having said that, the burger wasn’t the most flavoursome anyway. The patty was on the dry side, and tasted how I imagine old pressed flowers would taste. The bun was dense and white, and what’s that I see? It’s cucumber. In a burger!!
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| Even Instagram couldn’t make this look decent |
In some ways I liked the healthy crunch it provided, but it was all a bit baffling for me. Is this a burger or a sandwich? Come to think of it, I think this is the kind of burger (or sandwich) my granny might like. Egg mayonnaise and cucumber, it’s better suited to tea shops somewhere else, instead of being one of the only burger options available to those who feel a bit hungry after a few hours in an Amsterdam coffee shop. I don’t mean me, obviously.
I didn’t try the chips at Burgermeester, because they didn’t have any. The option was a jacket potato, which is the second worst way to eat a potato after the first way, which is boiling them.
Instead I got my fix of chips elsewhere. Just to prove how much The Dutch love mayonnaise, that’s not a boiled egg on my chips – it’s MAYO!
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| Chips and mayo and ‘curry sauce’ (tasted like Christmas) |
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| Chips and mayo and satay sauce (niiiiiiice) |
I’m not entirely sure I’d recommend Burgermeester to travelling Bruce Buds (and definitely not Bruce and the band), although it’s probably a better option than the vending machine burgers you find scattered across the city. I had gone with the intention of trying one of those, but when it came to down to it, I just couldn’t.
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| Some really depressed looking burgers |
Don’t worry though, I went on a mission to find a better burger in the city, and will report back on that soon.
For more info head to www.burgermeester.eu