Behind the Scenes at the Shake Shack

Posted by Adam Kuban, June 9, 2005 at 12:47 PM

NEW YORK CITY

The brief entry we ran that mentioned the Shake Shack reminded us of this item in recently launched food magazine Crave New York. In it, food writer Andrea Strong spends a day working at the smallish stand in Madison Square Park:

With the feverish desire that Shake Shack has generated—it averages 600 people per day—I was curious about what really goes on inside that hut in the park. And so, on a sunny day in late April, I spent the day in the approximately 20-by-30-foot box in Madison Square Park. I am still exhausted.

It's an interesting article that sheds light on the crew that feeds hundreds of hungry New Yorkers a day.

1 p.m. Danny Meyer enters. He walks over to [grill cook Corey] Steptoe, and they high-five elbows. He comes over to see how I am holding up. I am covered in custard and my face is flushed and greasy. "Are you having fun?" he asks. "Sure, this is great!" I reply, hoping to sound convincing. Though I'm having fun, I'm thinking, I'd last about a week in here: It's madness. He smiles and seems to sense my true feelings. "I know it's busy," he says. "Usually the dining room is the governor, setting a cap on the number of meals you will serve, but here we don’t have a dining room so there is no governor. The whole city is the dining room. They come, we feed them."

The one thing I can't get behind at the Shake Shack is that it modeled its custard after Ted Drewes in St. Louis:

In researching the concept that would become Shake Shack, [co-owner Richard] Coraine [business partner of the more well-known Danny Meyer] set out on a two-month cross-country road-food orgy, eating frozen custard and burgers from Maine to California, with stops at In-N-Out Burger and every frozen-custard joint he could find, including Ted Drewes in Meyer's hometown of St. Louis, which became the model for their secret frozen-custard recipe.

I was born in Wisconsin, the Dairy State, and often visit family who live there. Repeat: The Dairy State. Ain't no way that St. Louis–style frozen custard is better than Milwaukee's Leon's or Kopp's. (St. Louis is also second rate to Milwaukee in the beer department, too.)

Shack Attack: Behind the Scenes at Shake Shack [Crave New York]

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