Classic Beef & Cheese Burger (經典牛肉起士堡)

The Taiwanese breakfast burger has a known beginning. In 1981 Lin Kun-yen, who worked at a plastics company, saw American baseball fans eating hot dogs on television and decided hamburgers could sell the same way in Taiwan. He tried selling them at the Taipei Municipal Baseball Stadium without much success, moved to a food cart beside a vocational school where students bought them, and then opened a breakfast shop on Bade Road called Mei Er Mei. Because he never registered the name, it was copied everywhere; after years of court cases the brand split, but by 1992 his own network had more than 1,100 franchised shops.

• Taiwan
• Since 2013
• $

In Taiwan a hamburger is, first of all, breakfast. Since the 1980s the island has been covered with Western-style breakfast shops that open at dawn and sell toast sandwiches, egg crêpes, black tea and small sesame-bun burgers, made to order behind a counter. Q Burger is the newest big name in that tradition. It opened its first shop in 2013 in Sanchong, New Taipei, and grew faster than its older rivals, to more than 370 shops by January 2025, with a target of a thousand by 2030.

Several hundred breakfast shops across Taiwan, about half run by the company and half franchised.

The full Q Burger burger menu and story →