Shake Shack Isn T Too Bad At All

• Mike Sula
• ShackBurger, Shake Shack

It’s been open since November, but you’ll still find a line at the River North outpost of New York restaurant mogul Danny Meyer’s burger chain. OK, the lines aren’t the Biblical-length ones you’ll see on spring afternoons in Madison Square Park, the ones that make New Yorkers look like hordes of starving refugees, but we midwesterners sure seem to like our new Shake Shack. Unlike the overrated Umami Burger, Shake Shack makes more than just a nominal attempt at fitting in, serving Vienna Beef hot dogs, a Publican Quality Meats pork sausage, and incorporating ingredients from Vosges, Glazed and Infused, and Bang Bang Pie Shop for its concretes. But the lauded ShackBurger and its variants are a legitimate draw.

• Mike Sula
• SmokeShack, Shake Shack

The one thing I don’t get is the appeal of Shack Shack’s crinkle-cut fries. They’re terrible; cottony, larval nothings fried from a frozen state, that take me straight back to the elementary school cafeteria where they were commonly deployed in air strikes. The Shake Shack overlords seem to understand this too. A few years back they tried to replace them with fresh-cut fries and nearly incited a riot.