The Nutella Burger

McDonald’s Italy had a Nutella burger and it was exactly as ridiculous and perfect as it sounds—a bun with what must have been an entire jar of Nutella shoved inside and nothing else. I found out about it in 2016, back when the internet still showed you things you wanted to see instead of things it calculated would get you to click.

The appeal made a weird kind of sense. Someone at some McDonald’s somewhere decided breakfast and lunch didn’t need to stay separate, that you could just crash them together in the dumbest possible way and call it a meal. It was stupid and kind of brilliant. No apologies, no pretense. Just a delivery system for Nutella that happened to come in a bun.

The thing was it only existed in Italy. Which somehow made the whole thing better. You could drive down there, buy as many as you wanted before they disappeared, or you could just accept that the wanting might be better than the actual thing. The idea of it was probably sharper than eating it could be. I’m not sure I ever actually had one, but I remember wanting it. That wanting was vivid in a way that tastes almost never are.

There’s something clean about the existence of temporary things in one corner of the world. The Nutella burger was never going to matter to anyone, was never going to spread to other countries, was going to disappear and be replaced by something else. And that made it more real somehow than anything you could actually have. You remember wanting it more than you remember the taste.