There are places where you eat good food. And then there are places where you eat good food and feel something else entirely – a sense of familiarity, care, belonging. Places where the food is the starting point, not the destination. If there’s something more, you feel it. You just do.
There’s a place in Verona that’s famous across Italy for its burgers, but that’s not the whole story. It’s called Buns.
Meet Jack Ballarini
Jack Ballarini is the owner, founder, and the brain behind every single burger on the menu. Sure, you might think – all this fuss over a burger? But making something complex and layered out of something that seems so simple is a lot harder than it looks. Jack pulls it off. He takes bold, multi-layered flavors, studies them for months, and lands on a sandwich where everything is exactly where it should be.
We’d been wanting to go for a while – to see the place and meet the community where the Burger Lover’s Club was born. We finally made it.
Here for the video.
The menu: classics, specials, and the logic behind them
The menu at Buns has its own logic. There are the classics, the ones Jack keeps because they’re what he’d want to find if he walked into someone else’s burger place: anchors, almost educational in a way, the kind of comfort you can always count on.
The cheeseburger, the bacon burger, the Old School. And then there’s the Buns – a bestseller built around local ingredients: beef patty, Monte Veronese cheese, caramelized onion, bacon, baby spinach, Buns sauce. Beyond the classics there are bolder creations, both beef and fried chicken, and a veg option with fried mushroom that’s genuinely great.
Our personal favorite? The Totoro – fried chicken glazed in teriyaki sauce, coleslaw with cabbage, carrot, spring onion, ginger, peanuts, coriander, lime, vegan teriyaki sauce.
And then there are the specials. Sandwiches that only exist for few months, that change based on whatever is inspiring Jack and the team at that particular moment. Very often they come from outside the world of food – film, music, art. Sometimes a special makes it onto the permanent menu. Sometimes it’s so loved it comes back every year.
We ate through pretty much everything, and every single burger had its own personality, its own character – each one pointing to a very specific world.
The special we came to discover was the kimchi sandwich, made in collaboration with Kimchi Pop.
It started with a question Jack put to the community: “I want to make a kimchi sandwich – do you know any good kimchi?” Within minutes, hundreds of replies. Kimchi Pop kept coming up.
So he reached out to the couple behind this incredible kimchi, and they were thrilled to collaborate.
From there, Jack went deep. Lots of tastings, lots of testing. He started thinking beef and cheese, but the combination never clicked. He told us he spent an entire evening with a longtime friend he often bounces ideas with when creating his sandwiches, tasting an endless number of different cheeses, and they just couldn’t find the right combination. Then it hit him: chicken.
After countless more rounds of testing, here is the final recipe (and since we tasted it we can say it: absolutely delicious, perhaps one of our favourites): fried chicken coated with honey barbecue sauce, with gochujang mayo, ali oli sauce made with kimchi and burnt garlic, coleslaw made with Chinese cabbage, carrot, daikon and spring onion, and the Kimchi Pop kimchi.
And meanwhile, during the testing process, another super important part develops: all the communication and the preparation of the event
When a burger becomes an event
Every special gets its own launch event, and these are not casual affairs. For the kimchi sandwich there were custom posters covering the walls, stickers on every burger wrapper (something that always happens with a special, which is always personalised down to the smallest detail), and iron-on transfers to take home as a keepsake from that night. At the center of it all: a cabbage on fire, the main ingredient of kimchi, illustrated by a tattooist friend of Jack’s – from which all the other communication elements then developed.
Because for Jack, the communication is part of the product. The event, the visuals, the whole experience around a sandwich, it all has to match the quality of what’s inside the bun.
This isn’t a one-off. It’s just how things work here.
The Britney Burger, the Burger Games, and why people keep coming back
One of the most iconic specials is the Britney Burger – so successful it comes back every year. For the launch, Jack covered the place in early 2000s posters like a millennial’s bedroom, hunted down vintage ones on Vinted, and stocked up on old issues of Cioè (the magazine of an entire Italian generation). The headline poster read: “Eat me baby one more time.” Genius.
The Britney Burger: beef patty, molten fried brie croquette, caramelized bacon, blueberry pink mayo.
Then there were the Buns Burger Games – Buns’ answer to the Olympics. A special menu created just for the occasion: burgers and sides you had to try at least once each, across both locations in Mantova and Verona, within the set timeframe. As with every special, the collaborations were many: from the illustrations of Giacomo Bagnara, to the culinary contribution of Ristorante Sandi, the Michelin-starred Britedelarieto, the Gustificio and Monte Baldo beer.
Finish everything and you’d win a medal. In the end, 135 medals were handed out. In the Verona location there’s still a giant frame on the wall filled with Polaroids of every winner, medal in hand.
What makes Buns actually special
None of this would exist without a community. An enthusiastic one, built over time by genuinely involving people, asking them things, creating moments to come together, giving something real: a place to belong, a space to experiment, or just somewhere to hang out and feel good.
These events don’t make money. You cover costs, maybe. But something else is gained: people notice when a place has real human value, real effort, real care. And they come back. They become attached. Something gets created that goes way beyond a great burger even though the great burger is, let’s be honest, a big part of it.
Buns could expand. Maybe someday it will. But right now, this is the formula Jack loves, the rhythm it creates, the care it makes possible. Familiar, real, creative, incredibly good – and you feel it the moment you walk in.
