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TRAVEL BLOG

8.23.07

Big Mac Turns 40, Gets Own Museum in Pennsylvania

The burger that’s so influential the Economist magazine named an index after it is four decades old this year, and the centerpiece of the celebration is the just-opened McDonald’s Big Mac Museum Restaurant in North Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. It’s the museum featuring the 14 feet by 12 feet statue of a Big Mac, naturally. America’s most famous contribution to world cuisine—or, to some, an imperial symbol of the country’s gluttony—was created in a Uniontown, Pennsylvania McDonald’s in 1967 by Jim Delligatti.

"The first day we just used the regular bun, we didn’t have any center (bread) slice,” the now 89-year-old told Reuters. “Making it that way made it very sloppy. The next day we put the center slice in, and today it looks the same.” The museum, the brainchild of Delligatti’s son Mike, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, also features a Big Mac world map and the first Big Mac bun toaster, among other artifacts.

Whether travelers will get off Route 30 to see it all remains to be seen.

Photo by Alexandre Van de Sande, via Flickr (Creative Commons).

Posted by Michael Yessis • 8.23.07
Categories: Weblog • Food: The Moveable Feast • Global Village • United States

Permalink • Comments (1)

COMMENTS

Wow! I drove past that museum Monday in the rain the day before it opened, and wondered why they put it there, on a very undistinguished stretch of Route 30. A strikingly designed building however. I would have stopped if it had been open. Especially if they offered fries with it.

By Marilyn Terrell on 8.24.07 at 09:26 AM