Meet the Michelin-starred chef designing burgers for McDonald's
In Denmark, award-winning chefs are the celebrity spokespeople for the fast food chain
AARHUS, Denmark—Ever since Michael Jordan went toe to toe with Larry Bird for a Big Mac and fries in the early 90s, McDonald’s has used celebrity spokespeople, tailored to the fandom in local markets. In Spain, Latin pop artist Sebastián Yatra is used to sell double quarter pounders. Bollywood stars Kartik Aaryan and Rashmika Mandanna push India’s localized menu items. More recently in the US market, hip hop artists like Travis Scott and Cardi B promoted their own meals.
Celebrities eating McDonald’s! They’re just like us!
Walk into any McDonald’s in Denmark, however, and you will see rows of ordering kiosks featuring photos of a chef, apron and all, standing over the homestyle chicken sandwich which he helped create. This is René Mammen, owner of the Michelin-starred Substans in Aarhus. In this country, award-winning chefs craft McDonald’s burgers that infuse a little bit of the DNA from their restaurants into fast food.
Denmark does not have the most Michelin Stars—France and Japan each have hundreds of restaurants that have earned the accolade. But the afterglow of New Nordic cuisine’s frequent victories in international competitions over the past decade have turned fine dining chefs here into quasi celebrities. Coupled with the relatively small size of the market with just 6 million people, makes Denmark the perfect place to add a chef-driven item to the menu.
How we got here
During the pandemic, restaurants around the world were forced to shutter. Denmark locked down from the winter of 2020 until late spring 2021, allowing only takeaway and delivery. What if customers could get a taste of the fine dining that they missed, but from the coronavirus-safe confines of their own homes?
The first featured chef for the Homestyle burger line was Paul Cunningham from the two-starred Henne Kirkeby Kro on the west coast of Denmark. His Béarnaise burger featured a sauce that is normally served only at high end steak restaurants. There was backlash from the fine dining talking heads—the oft-outspoken Christian Puglisi of the two-starred Relæ posted a rant on Instagram, mostly to responses that he get off his high horse—but the sandwich was immensely popular, and sold out faster than McDonald’s executives had expected.
“It was the perfect storm,” says Mammen. “Denmark was closed down from Corona, so you couldn't go out to restaurants. When they launched it, it just went crazy.”
Michelin DNA
Like most Michelin-starred restaurants in Denmark, Substans offers only a tasting menu experience. Prices range from $72 for a business lunch to $245 for a full dinner, not including the wine pairings.
Food here is presented in a way that you would expect one of the standard-bearers of New Nordic cuisine: a bite of smoked celeriac arrives at the end of a twig being used as a skewer, a tartlet of king crab is presented on a bed of seashells, and beets are served with a heaping spoonful of caviar on top. The main course is red deer, which, although delicious and local, would give the McDonald’s supply chain manager ulcers trying to find enough of it to service all of its restaurants.
So how do you instill some of that experience into a product at a burger joint? Maybe McNuggets served on a twig?
The trick here are the sauces used as part of the tasting menu: “It’s local ingredients with an Asian flavor profile,” one server told me during my meal at Substans. Some of the best miso, yuzu, and kushu—to name just a few ingredients—are regularly flown in from Japan just for the restaurant. A custom sauce would be a small enough part of every sandwich that it could be seamlessly added to the McDonald’s supply chain, but important enough of a modifier that it would impart the restaurant’s DNA.
For his latest McDonald’s sandwich, Mammen created a mayo using white miso with dried lovage and extract from pickled jalapeños. “I knew that I wanted to do something spicy, because Danish people are really bad at spicy stuff,” says Mammen.
The Process
Large boxes full of ingredients—Danish herbs and vegetables alongside Asian specialty imports—were brought to the McDonald’s test kitchen in the south of Germany. “Then you stand with your bowl whipping a mayonnaise with your egg yolks and stuff and two German people taking notes and taking pictures and weighing everything,” says Mammen.
Once the desired flavor profile of the sauce is achieved, samples are sent to the lab. There, scientists figure out what flavors they can achieve using their existing library of compounds, and what requires new ingredients, substituting as necessary based on availability. For Mammen’s first McDonald’s burger, the sauce initially utilized a salsa made from a pepper that he had barbecued to get a smoky flavor. But when it came time for production, they could not find enough of the pepper.
“The scale is just crazy,” says Mammen. “They were planning on serving something like 800 thousand to a million of the first burger, and it has like 15 or 20 milliliters of the sauce. So it’s truckloads of just the sauce.”
Once the lab figured out how to produce the sauce at scale, samples of it were sent to headquarters in Copenhagen. There, Mammen would produce the sandwiches inside the ground floor McDonald’s, as if he were working the line, for a tasting with executives. Several tweaks were required: the first run had too much of an onion flavor, so notes were sent back to the lab. A new batch of sauce samples were produced, sent to Copenhagen, and this process repeated itself until the burger was ready for launch.
The Future
Mammen says that the burgers have sold extremely well, but apparently there is very little crossover between people that eat at McDonald’s and those interested in Substans (shocking!): the number of reservation requests have not changed in the six months since the chef’s burgers have been available.
McDonald’s marketing teams have already begun filming the commercials for the next chef to do the collaboration. So the next time you’re in Denmark, make sure to swing by a McDonald’s—it may be the cheapest way to eat food by a Michelin-starred chef.