Special Sauce, Fifty Years Running

You can walk into a McDonald’s having genuinely decided to try something different this time. They change the menu constantly—seasonal specials, regional experiments, limited runs with names that suggest an entire personality shift is available for under five euros. You look at the board. You order the Big Mac. You always order the Big Mac. There’s no shame in it; there’s actually something close to peace in knowing exactly what you want.

This year the Big Mac turns fifty. Jim Delligatti, the franchisee who invented it, died a couple of years ago, but the sandwich he built—two beef patties, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, sesame bun, that specific sauce, nothing more—has outlasted nearly every food trend of the past half century. For the anniversary, McDonald’s has been doing the rounds of collaborations, and the one worth paying attention to is with Uniqlo: a capsule T-shirt collection illustrated in the burger’s own colors, each design mapping the ingredients like a cross-section of something more important than it has any right to be.

Two beef patties, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, sesame bun, special sauce. That’s it. There’s a version of design philosophy in that—the thing that works is the thing you don’t touch. Fifty years, and nobody’s improved on it. Delligatti knew what he had.