Over the years, we’ve heard a lot about the Queen’s eating and drinking habits. One nice thing is that the Queen was a pioneer of farm-to-table, and that she’s always been a seasonal consumer, as in: she eats fruits and vegetables when they’re in season, fresh from her own local farms. One bad thing is that the Queen apparently does not enjoy seasoning or any kind, and the food is probably pretty bland in general. Which was fine for years, because the Queen was too much of a boozehound to notice. Now one of the Queen’s chefs is revealing something else: the Queen enjoys a burger every so often, but she doesn’t want the bun.
The Queen’s former chef revealed the Monarch’s fast food favourite, despite tending to avoid the convenient meals on the whole. Pro chef Darren O’Grady worked in the royal kitchen for 15 years preparing meals for the Queen, Prince Harry, Prince William and Princess Diana during his time at Buckingham Palace.
Darren revealed that the Queen dodges fast food as a rule but there was one thing that she really enjoyed. Much like most people we know, the Queen has a taste for hamburgers, only she orders her one without the bun. But, unlike most people we know, she didn’t hop on the bus down to McDonald’s or Burger King to get her fast food fix, instead having her kitchen team prepare her a meat patty from scratch.
Darren said: “It always tickled me at Balmoral, we would make our own burgers. They would shoot deer, and we would do venison burgers. There’d be gorgeous cranberry… stuffed into them, but we never set buns out.”
But when Darren wasn’t rustling up bread-free burgers for her Majesty, he was mainly cooking up classic French food. Darren also shared that the Queen did not enjoy pizza and during his whole 15 years at the palace not a single pizza was served.
Am I… the Queen? I prefer burgers without the bun as well. I like the taste of meat, and I don’t need the filler of a bun. That is one thing I don’t get about this modern era of burgers – they get higher and bigger and impossible to get your mouth around, and for what? A regular old burger tastes amazing. While I wouldn’t think the Queen would enjoy regular pizzas, I’m surprised that none of her castles has, like, an outdoor pizza oven for homemade pizzas? Hm.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.
Maybe she cant do gluten and dont like her replacement options?
I think it’s rather the carbs. and apparently no garlic too. I guess it’s to keep people from passing gas in her presence.
I LOVE burgers without the bun…I love bread, but just don’t see the reason to have it with a burger. Drives my husband crazy. I am so glad to know I am not alone in this!
I usually go bun-less, or just do a “lettuce bun”, and splurge those calories on super crispy fries! Yummmmm!!
I heard Lizzie abhors garlic, and other “heavy” spices because “..it can leave one with bad breath, and one is still having to converse with others at a meal…”. I actually do remember that quote from somewhere! So NO GARLIC FOR *YOU*! (In my best Soup Nazi voice!)
Ahhhh, Lizzie…you are missing out on SO MANY exquisite tastes in your mayonnaise blandness!
When we were kids, my mom preferred to make her own burgers for us, which she served not with buns, but with Wonder bread. We kids preferred buns we could get at the local burger joint, but not our mom, so that’s what we ate. Relish, catchup, mustard, no mayo. Mayo she saved to put on our peanut butter sandwiches.
Oh yes! I’ve had many a burger served on wheat bread hahaha!
I get these kinds of articles are meant to humanize the queen but right now with inflation and growing concerns about food scarcity due to the war in Urkaine, to read about the queen’s food being entirely sourced on her vast estates and being upheld as some paragon for sustainable eating is a farce. It’s not something to be impressed by, it’s a testament to the absurd system where the rich have access to the very best and the rest do not, even in times of crisis.
Everything they’ve done in the past 4 years — It’s like they’re completely divorced from the reality that the rest of the world has had to come to grips with, from institutional/systemic racism to the economic devastation of Brexit, COVID and the desperate situation in Ukraine. This little story is not cute.
right? The story is not cute, nor endearing. They clearly live in an alternate reality
This story to humane her, from Death’s memorial service with Andrew.
“She’s just like US”
As a Celiac, I have my occasional hamburger without a bun, too. *Adjusts tinfoil tiara to a jaunty angle* In fact, I’ve gotten pretty fond of the Beyond/Impossible Burger variety. But, man, I’ve got to have seasoning on my food — and cheese on the burger!
I love Beyond Burgers! I usually have them in a bun, but someday I might try the lettuce wrapped version that Carl’s Jr. offers.
“Make their own burgers” reminds me of a story Lee Iacoca told in his auto biography about Edsel Ford. Ford, son of Henry and head of the automaker, said he loved a hamburger but only at the Ford executive dining room. Nowhere else got it right. He’d rave about it. One day after Ford ordered another burger, Iacoca snuck into the kitchen to see what their secret was. Ends up they threw a NY strip steak into the grinder and made the burger from that.
I have visions of QE2’s burgers having similar origins.
My mom used to have our butcher grind up some skirt steak and lean chuck for chopped meat (when I was growing up we kept Kosher, and the butcher was a my mom’s best friend’s husband), so it was always the *best* cuts w/out question lol). Gotta say, with garlic and salt, some bread crumbs and an egg to hold it all together….thrown on the bbq.… *chef’s kiss*
Now I rarely do beef, but I make a *mean* turkey burger! And the *key* to those is spice! Lots of garlic, Worcestershire sauce, salt…and I also throw in either chopped onions or chopped bell peppers, chop/mix it all up well….and they are *so* good and juicy!
QEII’s are deer from Balmoral, thrown into the grinder with cranberries.
Chef Darren McGrady has been working in the U.S. since Diana died, you can watch his video on how to make burgers fit for royals on his youtube channel. Spoiler: he uses chuck. He has plenty of royal stories, none of them disrespectful.
Not surprised she doesn’t like pizza. She is 96 years old, so it is probably too new and trendy a food for her. She probably enjoys liver with onions.
“Darren also shared that the Queen did not enjoy pizza and during his whole 15 years at the palace not a single pizza was served. ”
That’s why Andrew was at Pizza Express Woking!
Haha if only he had had you on his legal defense team
I mean, this guy clearly worked for her a loooooong time ago, so I don’t know if it’s age as much as it is habit.
That’ll be William’s contribution to history–he’ll have outdoor pizza ovens installed at all his dozens of royal estates. The man loves his pizza.
Yeah, pizza as we understand it didn’t hit the UK until the mid-50s or so, and it tended to be more of a ‘young people’/middle class sort of thing.
And while Queenie may have actually BEEN a ‘young person’ in the 50s I think we can all agree that the Royal Bubble was then and remains now an island of fossilized culture wherein most things are 50 to 100 years behind the times.
A few weeks ago, Darren was being quoted by the MoS critcising Harry for not going to Philip’s memorial.
In some countries this is a very normal meal… I grew up in Denmark having “hamburgers” without the buns at least oonce a week. Served with potates and perhaps condiments. Untill the mid 80s at least hamburgers were a very rare thing. My mom would not allow me to eat at the very few McDonalds that were availabe at the time, she would make her own from scratch. And ketchup was too weird for her too, so sshe made a dressing instead. Anyway, to me, hamburgers as in a patty in a bun is just something completely other than “hakkebøf”.
https://www.madformadelskere.dk/dansk-boef-med-loeg/
This!! In my country you can order hamburger “on the plate”- It’s accompanied with egg, veggies, chips and rice…
https://www.pngitem.com/middle/hmbmbmT_prato-hamburguer-com-ovo-hd-png-download/
Nothing about this story is relatable and a burger without a bun is a Salisbury steak.
I thought Salisbury steak was hamburger–i.e., minced meat– not cooked?
Yeah, a burger without a bun is definitely just a Salisbury steak, minus gravy. Which sounds way less appetizing than a burger to me.
A hamburger without a bun is a Hamburg steak (yes Hamburg steaks used to be served raw or very lightly cooked but it’s been 90 years since that was popular in the US).
A Salisbury steak is a very specific recipe of Hamburg steak created by Dr. James H. Salisbury somewhere in the mid-19th century, in Missouri. It is standardized to the point that the USDA has specific legal guidelines for what items sold as ‘Salisbury steak’ may contain. (Salisbury steaks have always been served fully cooked, unlike other varieties of Hamburg steak.)
So glad smashburgers are big in my town. Kind of like the absurd bloody mary trend of putting everything but the kitchen sink in a pitcher, sometimes simple is better.
Sounds like she avoids things where she would have to pick the food up to eat it. Probably too gauche to actually handle your food by hand. I can picture her eating a candy bar with a knife and fork like that Seinfeld spoof.
She eats banana with a fork and knife.
OMG.. just had a visual of Ol’ Brenda “deep throating” a peeled banana! WHERE’S THE BRAIN BLEACH???!!!!!!!!
Don’t think Ol’ Brenda likes “deep throating”
I seem to recall that when I went to pizza parlors in England the year I lived there, people ate their pizza with knives & forks. As a gauche American–who needed a gazillion napkins & couldn’t find them–I found this odd.
That’s Pizza Express!
This reminded me of a judge on one of those Food channel shows. She must be an Anglophile and eats *everything* like the British — I swear to Dog she ate ice cream on the backside of her fork. It was ridiculous, but now I can envision the Queen doing something similar, lol.
Sorry I’m with the Queen.. Most Pizza is garbage. A load of bread with some cheap cheese and some extras on it.. Ugh. It’s gross. I don’t get anyone thinking pizza is good unless it’s made by a chef and without all that crap cheese.
I honestly cannot trust anyone who doesn’t like pizza. What is there not to like???
Could very well be that she’s never actually had pizza.
It’s fairly certain she’s not a big fan of bread generally and given her generation she probably doesn’t trust any food that’s not been boiled first.
Since pizza didn’t really get to the UK until the 50s and she was raised in the most conservative of conservative social circles who tend to think that onion and garlic is ‘common’ and thus unworthy of being eaten by them (unless you’re on vacation in one of those exotic foreign places like France in which case you can try a little garlic but only if it’s on something suitably odd like snails or frog legs)…
No, she probably hasn’t had pizza.
My grandma was the same way. Reading this makes me wonder if because growing up with rations and shortages it was just too frivolous to have the bread and it just became the way a burger was preferred for some. (My grandma died 4 years ago so I can’t ask her and as she would be the same age as the queen, I don’ t know if she’d actually remember why she started eating burgers the way she did).
All that said, when we make homemade burgers the patties are so good you just don’t need the bun!
Darren has been making money off his 15 years working for the royals for years. This is just another one of those articles, but rewritten by an American maybe? A hamburger without the bun is just a meat pattie, no drama about it. The Queen won’t eat food with garlic in it so she doesn’t breathe garlic fumes on people at state dinners, it’s probably not banned at other times? Though English food can be very bland and a bit boring.
And vension often gets minced up because it’s game and can be quite strong. Minced it makes it easier to cook and then eat. I’ve had reindeer meat patties in Sweden and that was minced meat too.
Perhaps she’s Banting. I am old. Hamburger without a bun, salad of lettuce and tomato – no dressing, and a scoop of cottage cheese garnished with canned fruit, used to be known as the “diet plate” and was a staple of menus at least through the 70s. I’m sure TQ’s naked burger is part of some variation of that old timey meal. My grandmother always ordered it, I was rather fond of it, because as someone who detested mayonnaise, you could be sure you were avoiding it.
*Banting is the UK term for dieting, or used to be. Not sure if the prevalence today.
More slice of life commentary on the queen, barf. I notice they always use backtrackable light manipulating words and sentences for their faves. But finite and sly words for the ones they hate.
But she doesn’t have ‘regular’, albeit bunless burgers; she has venison burgers, with cranberries. Sure, just like us.
She doesn’t like tomatoes, maybe that’s why she didn’t try pizzas.
I agree about the annoying trend of HUGE burgers. I HATE them! I passionately hate food falling out of buns, wraps, going all over my face, sauce dripping everywhere – BELGH. I nearly always remove one half of the bun because it’s often just overwhelming, and eat my burger with a knife and fork. I recently visited New York and went to Harlem Shake for a burger – best one of my life! (I am from the UK though..). Delicious and completely reasonably sized.
The comment about the Queen not going to McDonalds is silly. Fast food like that in general wasn’t much of a thing when she was growing up. I think she was in her 50s when the UK even got a McDonald’s. Plus it’s not like royalty would participate in such peasant tasks anyway.