The Surprising Way Queen Elizabeth II Eats Her Burgers

Queen Elizabeth II is the very picture of prim and proper elegance. Many people associate the monarch with refinement itself. It's easy to picture the royal at tea time, daintily sipping on a cup of her favorite tea, but it's a bit harder to imagine her chowing down on a juicy burger.

Believe it or not, though, the queen does enjoy a good burger from time to time — kind of. While most of us enjoy our patties on a bun, perhaps with some toppings like cheese, ketchup, lettuce, and tomato, Queen Elizabeth prefers her burgers without the bun.

The burgers also have to be made in-palace, as the royal doesn't eat fast food. "It always tickled me at Balmoral, we would make our own burgers," the queen's former chef, Darren McGrady, told Insider. "They would shoot deer, and we would do venison burgers. There'd be gorgeous cranberry and everything stuffed into them, but we never set buns out."

The lack of buns means that Queen Elizabeth — and whoever is dining with her — eats her burgers with a knife and fork. Even if she ate her burgers with buns, though, she would never pick it up with her hands. "Her Majesty's Victorian upbringing dictates that the only thing you would pick up and eat with your fingers is afternoon tea," said McGrady.

Another surprising bit of food trivia that McGrady has revealed about the royal is that she doesn't eat pizza. While it's possible that she has snuck in a slice from Pizza Hut from time to time, McGrady told Us Weekly that, in the 15 years he worked for the royal family, he never saw her have pizza.

"I didn't start cooking pizza until I moved across to Kensington Palace," he said, revealing that Princess Diana and her family ate quite a lot of it. "I [made] pizza all the time for William. In my second cookbook, The Royal Chef at Home, there's a chicken tikka masala pizza [recipe] because he loves Indian food. The pizza combined the two."