by No matter what you think of McDonald’s or its hamburgers, their place in burger history is inarguable. And the iconic Big Mac is a burger that has been imitated, replicated, deconstructed (and, of course, improved) thousands of times, all around the world. Commemorating this milestone in culinary history is the Big Mac Museum located inside a McDonald’s restaurant on U.S. Route 30 (the Lincoln Highway) in Irwin, Penn.
The Big Mac was invented in 1967 when Jim Delligatti, a franchisee who operated several restaurants in Western Pennsylvania, tinkered in the kitchen of one of his operations in Uniontown, Penn., and came up with the ubiquitous two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions-on-a-sesame-seed-bun sandwich. The Big Mac went on to glory, and even is used in a well-known economic index that compares the relative prices of Big Mac sandwiches around the world in order to evaluate economic health.
The Big Mac Museum features a fourteen-foot tall statue of the burger, along with a bust of Delligatti and other memorabilia from the decades. And of course I bought a Big Mac to eat for lunch, toasting Delligatti for his innovation. (If you didn’t know, I’m something of a burger aficionado –– follow me on Instagram in my burger quest.)
One final note: Uniontown, the official birthplace of the Big Mac, is about 40 miles from the Big Mac Museum. It seems that when the Museum was launched, the McDonald’s in Irwin was selected to host it, given that the restaurant there is located at a busy Pennsylvania Turnpike exit, thus allowing more burger fans to pay their respects to a marvel of 20th century food engineering.
