Illustration: Luo Xuan /GT

Hamburgers are the most perfect food in the world. Just one bite gives you everything: grain, meat, vegetable, and dairy.

With the brownish buns and soft insides oozing with cheese, each bite offers a diversity of textures.

With a real good burger, each bite is like heaven.

The cheeseburger is like a party of beef, cheese, bread, pickles, tomatoes and onions in your mouth.

A burger can be so glorious that it makes you want to write a sonnet dedicated to it.

Yes, it contains a lot of fat and salt, but what's the point of having food if it doesn't taste good. It's the whole point of burgers. Fatty meat makes you feel full, abundant and satisfied.

You feel you worked hard to deserve such a good treat, and what's more intriguing is that each burger is different.

Even if we omit the more important factors, such as the type of meat or cheese used to make them, burgers of the same kind have different levels of crustiness on the outside, different kinds of breads, and different toppings.

Changing any of the factors, even slightly, completely changes how the burger tastes.

But it's not necessarily a bad thing; different chefs make their own distinctive flavor.

I must admit though that I am a new convert to burgers. I have just started to appreciate them and explore all the options out there. I had no idea that a burger could be so amazing until a foreign friend of mine introduced me to an authentic burger restaurant in Beijing.

Prior to that, I thought hamburgers were just junk food designed for people who have no real appreciation for good food.

But one bite of the hot, amazing burger completely changed my mind and opened the door to a new world for me. It's even surprising to me that while traveling overseas, sometimes even a roadside hole-in-the-wall restaurant or a cafe that doesn't even specialize in burgers is capable of making a great one. It feels a lot like stumbling onto some sort of treasure.

The Chinese often take great pride in their cuisine, which boasts great variety of food and perfection in each category.

It's really hard for us to accept that a different type of food, especially one that lacks history, can be good.

I think many people around the world have a similar mindset when it comes to foreign food. They tend to hold a certain stereotypical prejudice in the initial stage and label it with the most commonly known features, such as it's spicy, curry-based, oily and so on.

Many of the expats I have met have shared how their exploration of different cuisines in China is fascinating and how they realized that their old idea of Chinese food needed to be updated.

The so-called Chinese food they had back in their country greatly limited their opinion of Chinese food to just General Tso's Chicken or sweet and sour pork. But there is so much more.


This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.