A bombshell study from food consultants Gira Conseil has revealed that the French ate a record 1.2 billion burgers in 2015, an increase of 11%.
The French consume an average of 14 burgers per person per year, not even half of the United States’s impressive 30-a-year. And they’re not all garbage: only a third of the burgers eaten in France 2015 came from fast food chains like McDonald’s, even though France is the company’s second-largest market after the U.S.
But still: the burger is on track to overtake the current top culinary dog, the jambon beurre: the French only ate 1.23 billion in 2015. According to Bernard Boutboul, head of Gira Conseil, “75% of French restaurants now have a burger on the menu, and 80% of those tell us it has become their biggest seller.”
Aside from the uptick in burger consumption, the French also gobbled up 10 million more pizzas than last year, when they consumed 809 million. They’re also slowly losing their famously languorous mealtimes: the average sit-down meal only lasted twenty minutes in 2015, down from an hour and a half in 1975. So basically, the French are turning into Americans.
If you’re in Paris and looking for one of the burgers the French are wolfing down en masse, here are the best places in the city for burgers that run the gourmet gamut.
