Trail of the Unexpected: Louis' Lunch, Conneticut

Lunch on the run? Then it has to be Louis Lunch in Conneticut, the place where the ubiquitous hamburger was invented

To savour the place where a fast food revolution began, don't be in too much of a hurry. The place where, at the end of the 19th century, a grilled hamburger was first placed between pieces of bread so it could be eaten on the run, was Louis' Lunch. It is located in New Haven, Connecticut – the home town of Yale University. The single-storey shack that changed the world is buried in the back streets, well away from ivy-clad college buildings. But the queue of students is likely to stretch out of the rickety old door and halfway down the street.

Louis is a one-off, still run by the great-grandson of the man who first devised the takeaway burger. You could wait half-an-hour for your "cheese works", the item of choice: a five-ounce burger of prime steak, flame-grilled in a 19th-century gas broiler, dressed with tomato, onion and cheese. But the wait is worth it.

In an exploration around the world to see how American fast food adapts itself to local cultures, I have chomped through everything from a veggie burger at the first McDonald's in Sri Lanka to what was ambitiously described as "raclette" – basically a large cheeseburger with extra attitude. I ate this dish at the golden arches' original venture into enemy terrain, at Strasbourg in France (McDonald's opened here in 1972, two years before the first British restaurant at Woolwich, south-east London). None of those meals compares with Louis' succulent hunk of ground beef crammed into two slices of toast; the toaster is a relatively modern 1929 appliance.

Jeff Lassen has had dozens of offers to franchise Louis' Lunch elsewhere in America, but has turned them all down rather than compromise the quality of the "cheese works". Maurice "Mack" and Dick McDonald were more ambitious. The brothers opened the original McDonald's burger restaurant, which applied no-frills thinking and production-line methods, on a street corner of San Bernadino, California, in the Forties. Dick devised the golden arches, and came up with the "Speedee Service System" on which profitability depended.

The premises were torn down long ago. But with 30,000 more branches around the world, serving 46 million customers each day, lost heritage may not matter; the McDonald's name is tattooed on the world's stomach.

Yet Mack and Dick have almost been erased from their part in the story; ask the average teenager about the founder of the burger chain, and most will say "Ronald McDonald" without hesitation. This clown was an ad-agency creation under the guidance of Ray Kroc – the man who bought the rights to the McDonald's method, and franchised the chain's proliferation across the US and the world.

While New Haven, Connecticut, is home to Yale, Oak Brook, Illinois, has a hallowed place of learning, too: the Hamburger University. It may not have the gravitas of an Ivy League college, but its students get the added benefit of valet parking. Tourists who stray on to the campus are welcome to visit a small museum dedicated to the memory of Kroc, who died in 1984. He is remembered as "Leader and Friend", and a tableau of his office occupies the foyer of "HU" as it is known to students and lecturers.

Twenty miles north in Des Plaines, the first franchised McDonald's has been preserved as a museum piece, while two blocks away Choo Choo's does a roaring trade in not-so-fast burgers delivered by toy train.

Many travellers deplore the uniformity that McDonald's has wrought upon the world – but some of these same tourists are not slow to nip into an overseas branch of the burger chain for a fast-food fix, or merely to use the reliably clean washrooms. They will find that behind the façade of standardisation, each nation comes up with its own version of McDonald's.

In Germany, for example, the usual idea that you clear everything away yourself is abandoned; instead, staff sort waste for recycling. Name badges carry a formal Herr Albrecht or Frau Meyer rather than "Chuck" or "Sam". A "classic capuccino" is on sale for €0.99 (£0.70) – and customers are encouraged to bring dogs in.

From the sightseer's perspective, there are some superb McDonald's around the world. In Times Square, New York City, the restaurant on the south side is fitted out to emulate a faux-industrial Greenwich Village bar. Would you like Art Nouveau with that? At Haarlem in Holland, the McDonald's has moulded itself into a shop that melts seductively around a corner. Same epoch, more opulence in Basel, where McDonald's has infiltrated a grand Jugendstil hotel.

However majestic the surroundings, though, the one place to which I shall return is Louis' Lunch. It may not be fast, but it is food.

Louis' Lunch is at 261 Crown Street,

New Haven (001 203 562 5507, www.louislunch.com). Choo Choo is at 600 Lee Street, Des Plaines (001 847 391 9815). 'Mack & Dick – and Ronald', produced by Rebecca Nicholson, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 11.02am on Friday, 11 April