Czech burger joint Pickle: from food truck to daily queues

The founders of the Brno food truck Būcheck and the Dezertina patisserie, Slovaks Peter Samúgel and Zuzana Zuzáková, have launched a new project — the burger joint Pickle. From day one, queues have formed outside the place, and sales have blown past even the founders' boldest forecasts many times over.

Pickle's concept is as simple as it gets: the menu has just four items — two types of cheeseburger, fries and cola. Despite the minimalism — or maybe because of it — the place sells between 1,000 and 1,200 burgers a day, instead of the three hundred the founders had originally counted on just to break even.

The business's appetite is impressive in numbers alone: the pickles for the burgers (two slices per burger) alone will require around five tonnes of cucumbers a year, while meat from supplier Maso Klouda runs at around 3.2 tonnes a month — nearly forty tonnes a year.

According to Samúgel, Pickle's success is the result of two years of preparation and analysing every mistake made in previous projects. "Before, we did everything on instinct, without calculating anything. We wanted to create the best products wrapped in an eye-catching brand — and that brought success, but it also hid mistakes that hardly anyone noticed," the entrepreneur admits.

Among the curious slip-ups of the past was plumbing wrongly connected to the coffee machines, which sent water straight down the drain and ran up a bill worth tens of thousands of crowns, as well as problems forecasting demand, which meant the sweets at Dezertina sold out too quickly and left customers unhappy.

This time, everything was thought through down to the smallest detail: the burger buns were developed in-house together with the Křižákovi bakery, modelled on American Martin's Potato Rolls, over the course of almost nine months. Even the way the onions are sliced and the proportions of the sauces were carefully fine-tuned. "We're not making gourmet burgers. Our goal is the best ordinary cheeseburger. We wanted everything to be as simple as possible. But as my favourite chef, Honza Všetečka, says: simple doesn't mean easy," Samúgel explains.

Having carefully planned the kitchen's logistics — from positioning the fridges next to the grill to the packing station — the team admits they're still a long way from a system on McDonald's level, but Pickle's menu is simpler and works faster. The success of the first outlet is already pushing the founders to think about expanding — among the possible destinations mentioned are Prague and even the island of Bali.