SETTINGUP SHACK
Shake Shack founder DANNY MEYER brings a new burger to the city
DannyMeyer has finally given into peer pressure. Since he erected the first brick-and-mortar Shake Shack in 2004 (it began as a cart in New York’s Madison Square Park in 2001), the St. Louis native and restaurant mogul has been fielding demands that he bring the burger joint to the Midwest. “It was inevitable,” Meyer says; the new Shake Shack opened its doors on Ohio last week. “Five years ago we [opened Shake Shack] in Miami Beach and really ever since that moment, tons of friends were saying, ‘Alright, so you can no longer tell us that you won’t leave New York. What you haven’t explained to us is why it’s OK to go to Miami but not come [to Chicago].’ ”
Meyer, 56, may be a born-and-raised Midwesterner, but New York has been the epicenter of his culinary domination for more than two decades. He very clearly remembers the night he decided to enter the restaurant game: He was 25 years old and having dinner with his family the night before taking the LSAT. “My uncle saw how depressed I was and basically said, ‘Why are you doing something you have no passion for? You’re gonna be dead forever, you’re gonna be alive for just a short time. Do something you love,’ ” remembers Meyer. “He said, ‘All I’ve ever heard out of your mouth for your whole life is howmuch you love restaurants. You should open one.’ It had never dawned on me.”
Meyer abandoned his law school path and, since opening his first eatery, Union Square Café, in 1985, has been on a steady roll, debuting fine-dining destinations in Manhattan like Gramercy Tavern and The Modern. At this moment, Meyer doesn’t even know how many restaurants he controls, saying, “It’s irrelevant to me. I can name every one of them, I just don’t ever count up howmany there are.” (Our count puts the number at 67, by the way, 56 of which are Shake Shacks.)
Meyer insists the Windy City outpost isn’t just a New York transplant in Chicago. “We actually mold our menus just a little bit, so that when we open any new Shake Shack, it’s gonna feel like [it fits] where it is,” he explains. To achieve such cohesion, culinary director Mark Rosati has to get a feel for the local scene or, as Meyer puts it, “He eats and he eats and he eats. He’ll eat at the fine-dining restaurants to understand what the avant-garde chefs are doing, he’ll ask those chefs what’s their favorite bakery, what’s their favorite doughnut, what’s their favorite hot dog.”
The results? The Chicago Shack boasts some never-before-seen items, like a sausage from Publican Quality Meats and custards (called “concretes”) made with local ingredients like Vosges chocolate and Glazed & Infused doughnuts. “It pays off because [the restaurant] feels like it’s part of the community, rather than just imposing on it,” says Meyer.
In 2015, Meyer will open a second Chicago location at the corner of Michigan and Madison, but making a permanent move back to his native Midwest isn’t in his plans— his rare moments of downtime are spent with his wife Audrey and four kids at home in New York. “I’ve got a full life,” Meyer gushes.“[My wife and I] really believe in that thing my uncle said: You’re gonna be dead for a long time. Try to get as much out of every minute as we possibly can.”