Quarter Pounder with Cheese

If the Big Mac is about sauce, this one is about meat, and in the US it finally got the meat right: the patty is fresh beef cooked when you order, so it lands with a real crust instead of a grey edge. Two slices of cheese, mustard and ketchup, sharp onions and pickles keep it simple. Plenty of people who grew up on Big Macs quietly switched to this and never went back.

A franchisee in Fremont, California, Al Bernardin, created it in 1971 for customers who wanted a bigger, meatier burger than anything on the board. It went national within a couple of years. In countries on the metric system it runs under other names, most famously Royale with Cheese in France, which Pulp Fiction turned into one of the best-known lines about fast food ever written.