The Power of Motivation
Ezequiel Maldjian, one of the founding partners of the burger temple that cooks the best burger in Spain.
How does it feel to see that one of your burgers has been chosen as the best in Spain?
When we created Hundred we set out on a mission: to make and sell the best burger in the world at the best possible price. It sounds very ambitious, but I think we are on the right track in that sense.
Being true to our mission, what we have done from day one is to internalize many of the processes involved in making a hamburger, starting with the bun, which for us is 50% of a hamburger, and the other 50% is the meat. Starting with the bread, we knead, ferment and bake the hamburger buns daily in our central bakery, the same ones that we distribute every day in our points of sale, and with the meat, what we do is to mature the whole pieces between 60 and 90 days, and then we mince them every day, and they are grilled by hand, all in an artisanal way.
What is the day-to-day at Hundred like? How are the products made?
A normal working day really starts when the restaurant closes, because when we close we see what is left in stock, and from there, we create routes where in our central workshop, from first thing in the morning, we start to elaborate the products.
By mid-morning, the first products are finished and are taken fresh to the restaurants. There we finish cooking these elements, in the case of the bread, it is cut and toasted, and the hamburger is cooked on our grills. In the case of the Paul Finch, which has been chosen as the best hamburger in Spain, it is a hamburger that has an egg yolk sauce that we make in the workshop, in addition to all the ingredients that the Singular, for example, has, such as caramelized onion, or the Hundred, where all the vegetables are cut daily in the workshop.
How did the idea for Cien come about?
It started as a hobby, one day Alex called me because his mother has a restaurant called Singular & Co in Puerto de Sagunto, and he told me that he would like to go to New York to try burgers to add some burgers to the menu, and we had previously been to Copenhagen and the west coast of the USA eating burgers but we had never been to the burger mecca like New York.
We grabbed some cheap flights, stayed in a crappy hostel and for four days we ate 15 burgers and decided to create an Instagram account to keep track of the whole process, the account was called Burger Pursuit. We liked it so much that we decided to keep tasting burgers in the same way that people go sightseeing to see museums. We would travel around different cities and document it, in fact, on Hundred's Instagram account, you can see our different trips and all the burgers we've tried. We think it's part of the story and the essence, that it's not just a brand that was created to promote a product, but it's something more true and real from its creators.
If someone is going to try Hundred for the first time, what would you recommend?
I would recommend that they try the singular or the satisfaction, because the first one has a very characteristic flavor that almost everyone likes, it is difficult for someone to leave with a bad taste in their mouth because it has all the good points of a hamburger, and the second one is a hamburger with double the meat, double the bacon, with a smoked mayonnaise that we make ourselves and it is very good. I would recommend eating the burgers al punto.
And then there's the Paul Finch, which is for meat lovers, because it's beef aged for 90 days and has a lot of flavor. So for the first time, I would recommend those two, and then as you get into the Hundred ecosystem, you get into burgers like the Paul Finch.
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