The History of Burgers
From Hamburg to Chatham

The burger is so ordinary, so everywhere, that it's easy to forget it has a history at all. But the sandwich you order without thinking is the result of more than a century of immigration, invention, argument, and craft — and a handful of small-town cooks who all claim they got there first.

We're Chatham Burgers. We've been crafting burgers on the same charcoal grill since 1985, so we have a soft spot for where this food comes from. Here's the full story — from Hamburg steak to the modern smash burger — and where four decades of doing it the old way fits into it.

Where the Burger Began: Hamburg Steak

The word gives it away. Hamburger comes from Hamburg, the German port city. In the 1800s, Hamburg was known for a dish of seasoned, finely chopped beef — what English speakers came to call "Hamburg steak."

German immigrants carried the dish across the Atlantic. By the mid-1800s, "Hamburg steak" was appearing on American restaurant menus — including high-end ones in New York — as a known, respectable way to serve beef. At this point, though, it was just a patty on a plate. There was no bun, and there was no sandwich. That part came next, and it's where the story gets contested.

The Contested Birth of the American Burger

Put the patty between bread and you have a hamburger — but nobody can agree on who did it first. Several towns claim the title, and each makes a real case:

• Charlie Nagreen — Seymour, Wisconsin (1885). "Hamburger Charlie" is said to have flattened a meatball between two slices of bread at the Seymour Fair so customers could walk and eat. Seymour still calls itself the "Home of the Hamburger."
• The Menches Brothers — Hamburg, New York (1885). Frank and Charles Menches reportedly ran out of pork sausage at a county fair, substituted ground beef, and — the story goes — named it after the town they were in.
• Fletcher Davis — Athens, Texas (1880s). "Old Dave" is credited by some Texans with serving ground-beef sandwiches at his lunch counter, and possibly bringing them to a wider audience years later.
• Louis Lassen — New Haven, Connecticut (c. 1900). Louis' Lunch is often credited with serving one of America's first hamburger sandwiches, and the tiny shop is still open today.

The truth is that the hamburger probably wasn't invented once — it was invented many times, by different cooks solving the same problem: how do you serve hot beef to a hungry crowd that wants to keep moving? The one thing everyone agrees on is what made it famous.

1904: The World's Fair Moment

At the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, the hamburger went from a local curiosity to a national sensation. Vendors sold them to enormous crowds, newspapers wrote about them, and visitors carried the idea home. The same fair is often linked to the popularization of the ice cream cone and iced tea — it was a coming-out party for American street food, and the burger was its breakout star.

The 20th Century: Fast Food and the Burger Boom

For a while, ground beef had an image problem — it was seen as cheap and unsafe. One company changed that.

White Castle, founded in Wichita, Kansas in 1921, built spotless white-tiled kitchens specifically to convince a wary public that a five-cent burger could be clean and trustworthy. It worked. White Castle is widely regarded as the first hamburger fast-food chain, and it standardized the burger as everyday food.

The cheeseburger arrived somewhere in the 1920s or '30s — most often credited to a young cook named Lionel Sternberger in Pasadena, California, who is said to have dropped a slice of cheese onto a cooking patty. Then came the giants. The McDonald brothers opened in San Bernardino in 1940 and rolled out their assembly-line "Speedee Service System" in 1948. Ray Kroc began franchising it in 1955, and the burger became one of the most recognizable foods on the planet.

Speed and scale made the burger universal. But they also flattened it — frozen patties, heat lamps, and uniformity became the norm. Which is exactly the gap that flame-grilled, made-to-order burgers were born to fill.

The Flame: Why Charcoal Changed the Burger

While the chains chased speed, another tradition kept the burger close to the fire. Cooking over live charcoal is one of the oldest ways humans have prepared meat, and it does something a flat-top griddle simply can't.

Charcoal burns hotter and radiates a different kind of heat. As the patty cooks, fat renders and drips onto the coals, sending smoke back up into the meat. The result is a deeper, crustier sear and a smoky flavour you can taste in the first bite. It's slower and messier than a griddle — which is precisely why most high-volume operations gave it up.

We didn't. Chatham Burgers has cooked on a real charcoal grill since day one, and we've never switched to gas. Forty years later, the flame is still the whole point.

The Smash Burger Revival

The newest chapter is really an old one. Smashing a patty thin to build a crisp, caramelized crust is a diner technique that goes back decades — but in the 2010s it roared back as the "smash burger," and it's been everywhere since.

The science behind it is the Maillard reaction: press fresh beef onto screaming-hot metal — or, better, a charcoal flame — and you create hundreds of new flavour compounds in that lacey, crispy edge. We dig into exactly why charcoal takes the smash burger to another level in our guide to the charcoal smash burger.

A Short Timeline of the Burger

Our Chapter

The Burger Comes to Chatham

Every burger you eat carries all of that history in it — the immigrants, the fair, the chains, the fire. When we opened in 1985, we made a simple bet: that people would always choose a burger made the real way over one made the fast way.

That meant fresh beef from local farms, delivered daily. Buns from a local bakery every morning. Fries cut by hand. And always the charcoal grill — the same one, the same recipes, for forty years. If you want to know where Chatham Burgers fits in the wider local scene, we wrote an honest guide to the best burgers in Chatham too.

See the full menu and order online at chathamburgers.ca/order.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line

The burger has been a peasant dish, a high-society steak, a fairground snack, a symbol of fast food, and a craft worth arguing over. It survived every version of itself because the idea at the centre is so good: great beef, cooked with care, ready to eat.

That's the part we've held onto since 1985. Real local farm meat, fresh-baked buns, fresh-cut fries, and a charcoal flame — the burger the way more than a century of history says it should be made.