Burger Brief takes a look at some of the contestants in the Beijinger‘s 2015 Burger Cup. Now that we’re down to the Sweet 16, we talk to Marcus Medina of Q Mex, whose venue is still in contention for the honor of Beijing’s Best Burger.
Name: Marcus Medina
Nationality: Mexican-American
Number of Years in Beijing: 4
Venue: Q Mex
Name of signature burger: Carnitas Burger
Tell us about your signature burger. What makes it the best burger in Beijing?
This is basically our Mexican burger, made with carnitas, the shredded and braised pork and beef used in taco and burrito filling.
I was born in California, but my parents are Mexican and I went to chef school in Mexico city. I really enjoyed learning how to cook carnitas while I was there. They have a sesame base, which is easy to duplicate in China, because so much of the food here uses sesame as well. And that’s not the only thing that Chinese and Mexican cuisine have in common – they both also have major differences from region to region. Carnitas is a signature food from Michoacan state in the south west of Mexico, so making a burger with carnitas really evokes that southwestern flavor. It’s time consuming to make carnitas – they need to be braised in lard for hours, but that makes them really tender, so it’s more than worth it. I serve this burger with Chipotle mayo on top, which is easy to get here in Beijing, surprisingly, but it’s not cheap.
What does the burger come with?
I like to serve the Carnitas Burger with a side of roasted corn, which is tossed on a spit on a fire, before I cut it and mix it in a heavy cream base. But all our burgers have a few options for sides. Instead you can have our potato wedges, which are double fired, which means they’re first fried under very low heat in oil, then fried again on high heat. This gives them a crispiness on the outside and a creaminess on the inside. We also have a Mexican cabbage coleslaw, which is nice and light – a good choice for hot days, when you’re having something that’s heavy like a burger.
What drink from your menu goes best with the burger?
One of our most popular beverages is a special Mexican-American invention called the Bulldog. Basically they’re made with a margarita that has a Corona stuck in it. Very simple, but delicious and light and smooth, which makes them go really well with heavy burgers or Mexican food.
For years it was hard to make Bulldogs in China. Back home we would make them with little Coronas, but here the Corona bottles are so big they’d make the margarita topple over. Corona actually realized they might be losing some business, so they made this red rubber clamp that holds the bottle in place so it won’t tip, which I think is really funny. It’s one of our best selling drinks, partially because of how it looks – if you have one sitting on your table, the other customers around you are going to notice, and they’ll want to try one too.
What other burgers do you have on the menu?
We also have a classic single patty, and a double cheese burger. Aside from our Carnitas Burger, I think the double cheeseburger is the burger that I’m most proud of. In fact, we spent more time trying to get the burgers right here than any other menu item. Making a good burger is much more complicated than it seems. That’s especially true in China – it’s hard to get good meat here, so we had to find the right supplier and the right cuts. We do our own mixing and grinding for our burgers, so we had to figure that out. It took a long time, but I’m proud of what we’ve done. I’m proud of our Mexican food, which is needless to say, because I’ve made Mexican food all my life. But I’ve never done a burger like we do it here – trying to find the cuts of meat you need, grinding it here at the restaurant, and especially mixing it so that it has the right proportions of fat content. You need that fat content to make the burger juicy.
I first learned about these complexities of burger making when I worked as a restaurateur in New York. I moved there more than 25 years ago from LA with my brother after I finished chef’s school. My brother used to work as a water on a cruise ship that stopped in New York all the time, so he convinced me to come. We quickly found out that New York had one of the most diverse culinary scenes in the world, but that it was hard to find a decent burger. Most of the diners were run Greeks at the time, and it was a lot like that famous SNL sketch (VPN required), where the waiter keeps yelling “Cheese burger! Cheese burger!” at the customers. They’d figured out when the lunch crowd came in, and had all the burgers pre-made, so they were dry and had no flavor at all.
My brother and I opened many places in New York. One of them that still exists today, called Vynl, is an old style diner, and we’d make really juicy fresh burgers. It was a big success – Madonna used to come by pretty regularly in the mid-00s.
Aside from your own restaurant’s burger, what was the best burger you’ve ever had?
It would have to be Shake Shack in New York. It opened in the early 00s, and was a big influence on my own burger place.
Before Shake Shack, as I was saying earlier, most diners sold really awful pre-made burgers. But Shake Shack was different – it was started by Danny Meyer, this renowned fine dining chef who had opened Union Cafe in Union Square, which used to be a rundown, infamously junkie-filled neighborhood. But it was also a hub for young people, because NYU’s dorms were nearby, and when he opened Union Cafe it became one of the most famous upscale spots in town, and changed the whole neighborhood. People thought that was a big success, but then he opened this small food cart in Madison Square Park called Shake Shack. I remember people lining up around the block, waiting for more than hour to get a burger and a milkshake there. Now it’s this huge, super famous chain that’s totally changing fast food. He started the burger revolution in New York. I remember meeting him at an event with a bunch of other chefs, and we both got excited talking about how frustrated we were with all the bad burger joints in New York. He told me about his passion to make great burgers, and how difficult it was. He said too many places make the same missteps, like pre-making their patties, or making the biggest mistake of all, which he said was: “Too many of us underestimate the complexity of a good burger.”
Photo courtesy of Q Mex