The Secret Sauce

How Lebanese immigrants made the mushroom burger a menu staple

- Omar Mouallem

A MUSHROOM BURGER IS, well, a burger with mushrooms. After that, the sky's the limit. It might be topped with white, yellow or blue cheese, onion rings, avocado-whatever floats your 'shroom.

But there's one region of the world where the mushroom burger is a definable entree-a sizable beef patty smothered in sautéed canned mushrooms and sauce comprised mostly of cream of mushroom soup. You'll find it across Alberta and inland British Columbia, but also 10,000 kilometers away, in the mountains of Lebanon-homeland of the man who popularized it in Western Canada.

Rudy Kemaldean didn't actually bring the burger recipe with him in the 1950s when he immigrated with his brother from Baalchmay, a village 15 kilometers uphill from Beirut. He found the sauce in Edmonton, at one of a few remaining outlets of Burger Baron, a floundering fast-food shack that made a roaring comeback after he bought it. His relatives joined him, and the Kemaldeans/Kamaleddines (the spelling varies depending on which brother filed the paperwork) were soon running a dozen Burger Barons. After civil war broke out in Lebanon, these restaurants became training grounds for future Canadian citizens who were hired as cooks, learned the recipes, and then took those secret sauces with them to small Prairie towns when it was time to strike out on their own.

They opened dozens of burger joints, often under the same name and logo, without any legal permission.