Every Line Ends at a Burger

Lara Kleiner took the Berlin U-Bahn map and replaced every station name with a burger restaurant, and the result—published over at Mit Vergnügen—is either a work of pure civic utility or the best piece of information design I’ve seen this year. Possibly both.

Berlin has a specific relationship with the burger. Not the gourmet-truffle-oil kind, not the artisanal-brioche kind—the real kind, the kind you want at two in the afternoon when you’re hungry and slightly dehydrated and you need something hot, heavy, and honest. Tommi’s Burger Joint in Mitte has been consistently excellent for years; the queue outside on a Friday evening tells you everything you need to know. Burgeramt in Friedrichshain does a version with fried egg and jalapeños that I’ve thought about more than I should. Burgermeister under the Schlesisches Tor arch in Kreuzberg is practically a tourist attraction at this point, but the burgers are still good enough that I refuse to be smug about it.

The map turns the city’s geography into edible logic—where you are determines what you eat, the transit lines become hunger lines, every transfer an opportunity to reconsider your appetite. Print it, carry it, work through it systematically from southwest to northeast. You’ll be ten kilos heavier by the end. Worth it.