Shake Shack

Why is Shake Shack so good? Can a hamburger be worth an hour standing in line? Throngs of New Yorkers say yes. I whole heartedly agree, but do not quite understand why.


When people mention that they have never been to Shake Shack, I always say I will take them. And I have never had a disappointed friend. If I may paraphrase someone, "Shake Shack was the first burger I've had in years and it simultaneously raised my quality of life and decreased my life span." Or something to that effect.

Indeed, it is glorious but for all its splendor, the presentation is humble. I mean, I had Sliders as appetizers that look bigger than this burger. I've ordered burgers in linen table-clothed restaurants that I don't care to remember how much I spent to add a slice of "Vermont aged organic sharp cheddar" to my half pound "Kobe Sirloin" patty. And yet, I'm never happier with a burger than sitting on a hard metal folding chair in the freezing cold or blistering heat, with this simple thing, adorned with only a leaf of green lettuce, a red tomato disc, and a few chopped onions. And I have never left unsatisfied or less than stuffed. If I lived any closer to Shake Shack, sometimes I think the walk wouldn't be long enough to recover from it.

How can something this unassuming be so...perfect?

Sometimes I think if I took the burger out of the shack, how I would feel about it. Would I be so attached? Would I wait anywhere else for this burger? It is hard to say. If this was some famous bar burger that had a similar line out the door, I might skip it and go elsewhere. Then again, I've waited more than a few minutes before for a booth at Corner Bistro (granted, I have usually just learned to avoid it at high traffic hours). Certainly though, never the proportions that I have for shake shack. In fact, the only place I have ever waited longer for food is Grimaldi's, and that is a similar legendary wait-experience. Maybe it's the distance, but even the quality of Grimaldi's pizza, though, does not have me running back as frequently as shake shack does.

I'm certain that my favorite part of any burger meal, the fries, are not the strongest at shake shack. Aside from obviously favoring the spuds at Pomme Frite, I think even places like The Sidewalk Cafe's cajun fries (certainly some frozen variety) are, objectively, tastier.

So, again, why am I constantly drawn back to Shake Shack? Why does everyone else perk up at the mention? Why does everyone love it so gosh darn much?

Perhaps there's some merit to the Gestalt principle, the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

As a side note, one day, to be adventurous, I got the hot dog instead of the burger. While not bad, just don't waste a trip in line on it. Not worth it. Unlike the burger.

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"Put Some South in Yo' Mouth"

I like meat. Ever since I was a kid, I have always been a steak and potatoes kind of guy. I have fond memories of eating at Woody's back home, they used to run an all you can eat ribs special and I remember wearing that bracelet proudly. Which explains why I am always game for Brother Jimmy's Monday night special: All You Can Eat Hot Wings, Rib Tips, and Bud Light.


While I am not from the South, nor claim to be well versed in Southern culture, I still enjoy delicious BBQ (not to be confused with Dallas BBQ). And while Brother Jimmy's may seem a little tacky, I still kinda like drinking out of mason jars. Baseball on a few screens around the room was also nice.

Was there ever a pair better suited together than beer and hot wings? They are the Bill and Ted of the gastronomic world, an excellent adventure. Throw in some ribs and it's like George Carlin telling them they are gonna save music. And Brother Jimmy's has only improved their hot wings since the last time I've been there, which is quite impressive. I'm not sure why, but I have really been coming around to Blue Cheese with wings. And the rib tips were well executed as per usual, fall off the bone tender. I recommend the Honey Mustard sauce or possibly the Chipotle, but all are pretty good. Well, except the Carolina. Trying for a vinegar based sauce, it just comes out watery and bland. Disappointing. But all in all, it's a pretty balanced meal: You have carbs (beer), protein (beef and chicken), and fats (blue cheese and buffalo sauce). Gotta have all of the food groups represented.

This time out, I do feel a little bad that I couldn't quite eat as much as I hoped. We didn't even quite clear 4 platters of food (between 5 of us) but at least we made it to the bottom of 6 pitchers. So that's something. And then there's always next Monday.

But it's night like these that make you realize just how good it is to eat with friends. You feel a little sick but know it's worth every little bit. Wouldn't trade moments like these for the world.
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Do You Want Fries With That

“Every country possesses, it seems, the sort of cuisine it deserves, which is to say the sort of cuisine it is appreciative enough to want.”
-- Waverley Root

The paper crinkled as I wadded the wrapper and threw it into the bottom of the empty and grease stained bag. Out of the countless times I had gone through this motion, I had never realized until now that it really was like unwrapping a present on Christmas day. I could feel the oily salt adhere to my fingers as I plucked clumps of French fries from their red cardboard sleeve. I unabashedly licked the savory residue off each digit before digging back into the cheeseburger, pillowy soft all the way through. This was the reassuring taste of nostalgia, of childhood and home, that I so desperately missed. Truly, eating under the glow of those golden arches is what it means to be an American. Which was a little jarring considering I was spending my summer on a foreign exchange program in Japan. The commercialization and industrialization of food, on a transnational scale, has drastically changed how people see food; that is, with an emerging homogenous world cuisine. And no other industry better exemplifies this concept of corporate globalization than fast food.
Americans spend an estimated 90 percent of their food budget on processed and packaged goods. We spend over 110 billion dollars annually on fast food; more money than movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and music – combined. It has penetrated so deep into our culture that it is no wonder that works like Fast Food Nation and Super Size Me grabbed national attention. When Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio went around the world looking at what families eat in a week, American families like the Revises of North Carolina seem prime examples of how pervasive the fast food industry has become.
Ron, a trim, fit man, works out mainly for the cardio benefits…But he eats fast food for lunch five days a week…The work outs were great, but there was an unintentional by-product: they had less time for home-cooked meals. “We would pick up fast food. It was the most convenient thing to do. That is not the result that we had in mind when we started this exercise program.”

Spending nearly 72 dollars every week on fast food, it makes up over 20 percent of their food expenditure. And they are hardly an outlier in this regard. As they said, fast food has simply become “the most convenient thing to do.” Indeed, as Michael Pollan points out, fast food is specifically designed for convenience (and unashamedly so, with a moniker such as ‘fast food’): from cup holders to support the quart of coke each passenger requires, the drive-thrus that eliminate the need to get out of the car, and the tailored concepts of foods like Chicken McNuggets that can be consumed one handed (without the pesky need for a plate or utensils), it is no wonder that up to 19 percent of American meals are eaten in the car. Through science and technology we have revolutionized both what and how we eat.
It was this very notion of modern worldliness that allowed McDonald’s and other fast food corporations to permeate throughout the rest of the world. Even political barriers such as the Soviet-American tensions could not prevent the golden arches from spanning into Russia
In 1995, my landlady Anya, a retired geologist, recalled that when McDonald’s and the pizza restaurants first opened in Moscow, it was precisely their foreignness that prompted long lines of curious customers.

Yet, as Caldwell soon discovered, though lines were out the door for the experience, many Muscovites, especially the older generation, could not quite understand the appeal of the actual taste of the food. Similarly in China, though families flocked to the eatery, adults generally avoided the food themselves, instead going for the experience—especially for the sake of their children.
Yan also discovered that working-class Beijing residents save up to take their kids to McDonald’s and hover over them as they munch. (Later the adults eat in a cheaper, Chinese-style restaurant.) Parents told Yan that they wanted their children to “connect” with the world outside China. To them, McDonald’s was an important stop on the way to Harvard Business School or the MIT labs.

To these people, McDonald’s is not necessarily the convenience that so many Americans like the Revis family use to make their daily routines easier. It is a gateway into a larger world scale society—especially for the sake of their children.
And it seems to be working; though their parents are still hesitant to eat a Big Mac, the kids have taken quite a liking to them. Just as Caldwell found adults questioning why anyone would be coming back for the food at McDonald’s, interviews with schoolchildren proved to show just the opposite: that McDonald’s has become so commonplace that the children readily identified it as Russian food. And when University of Hong Kong students complained of missing home-style cooking while in Taipei, all they said that they wanted was McDonald’s. From young girls in the Australian Outback considering Mackas (Aussie slang for McDonald’s) “their culinary mecca,” Samurai Colonial Sanders attracting children’s eyes in Tokyo, and college students in France compromising their culinary beliefs “when pressed for time…[ducking] into the nearest McDonald’s,” a new generation around the world is growing up accustomed to the fast food lifestyle.
But this childhood adoration of fast food may simply be that, childhood adoration. Not just foreign adults just now facing challenges to traditional home cooking, but even for the millions of American adults who grew up raised on a diet rich in fast food are starting to turn against it.
I ate a lot of McDonald’s as a kid…I loved everything about fast food…Whatever it is (surely food scientists know), for countless millions of people living now, this generic fast-food flavor is one of the unerasable smells and tastes of childhood – which makes it a kind of comfort food…but after a few bites I’m more inclined to think they’re selling something more schematic than that—something more like a signifier of comfort food…And so it goes, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied exactly, but simply, regrettably, full.
A backlash is emerging; people are becoming more and more aware of the unsettling notion that their hamburger may be more than just beef and a bun. What is “grill seasoning”? Or even for that matter, what kind of cow is this beef coming from? What has it been eating? It is questions like these that have spurred on a counterculture, looking to revolutionize society and lifestyle, centered on changing what and how we eat. Or rather reverting back to what and how we ate.
A consumerist theme targeted foods to be avoided, especially chemicalized “plastic” foods. A therapeutic theme had to do with positive concerns for pleasure and identity, particularly a hunger for craftsmanship, leisure, and tradition. Concerned with the integration of self, nature and community, an organic motif addressed serious issues of production and distribution, that is, how to reconcile private consumption with wider planetary needs.

It was a movement in direct opposition to everything that seemed to make McDonald’s and fast food so appealing in the first place. Should the burger I ate in urban Japan taste exactly the same as ones from my California suburban childhood? What about the notion that “not only is it served in a flash, but more often than not it’s eaten that way too…”? Or that it is food that necessitates families “eating alone together”?
Part of the problem is that these values of the “old-fashioned, traditional, nostalgic” and being “more honest, simple, and virtuous” are an extreme to which one must fully commit both time and skill. And most people just cannot make those sacrifices, which is why, though criticism like Pollan’s and Schlosser’s makes us more aware of the problems, there needs to be alternatives to these two extremes. For all of their faults, industry, science, and technology have made food cheaper. And for a world with an ever growing population, that is a good thing. Some consider McDonald’s as a form of “cultural imperialism,” that “the rapid spread of McDonald’s and its fast-food rivals undermines indigenous cuisines and helps create a homogenous, global culture.”
In this time at the beginning of the new millennium it is not unusual to hear intelligent people say that the era of the nation state and national culture is ending and a brave new world of global consumer culture, multinational economies, and transnational migration is upon us.

But is this really true? Yes, the burgers taste the same everywhere but at the same time, each culture has taken this bland, amorphous thing, and domesticated it. Whether you call it “glocalization” or that McDonald’s has become “multilocal” it is obvious that it is too easy to see only the one dimension of imperialism with fast food. Things are not that black and white. The deeper we look at cultures, and people, the more complex things become. And what if things are becoming more transnational? Is it so bad for a guy in Boston to grow up with a similar food memory as a woman in Beijing? Food is a strong unifier, and as we become more and more removed from community in one sense, sometimes even the most tenuous tie can keep us bound together in another.

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Too Young to Care

I promised myself after finishing college that, amongst other things, I would start eating better. Coupled with the fact that I am broke, you'd think I simply would finish the 10 pounds of pasta sitting in the pantry before we move out of here. Instead, in true unemployed hedonism, I've been eating just as poorly.


I've written ad naseum about Professor Thom's before, but I really love this place to death. It's sorta one of my favorite bars. Also, thanks to Lost Night, I have a regular bartender! She was very happy to see me on Saturday and I dunno if I should feel like it's Cheers or time for AA. Either way, after a day at shopping in SOHO (I love Uni Qlo) with Kyle and Julia, I met Jill at the park, to enjoy the fountain slash grumble about not graduating there, then we headed to the bar to grab a drink and catch the Sox game. Though I no longer have team affiliations really (I used to support the Dodgers), I still love the game. And beer. And Fish and Chips. Though it was a Saturday Night, fleet week, and a beautiful day, the bar was busy but not packed and lively but not noisy. PT's is truly how I want my sports bar to be. Even if it is a Sox bar. It still feels like home. And as always, get the nachos, they feed an army.

And tonight, Julia, in her infinite kindness, called me up and told me she was near Boston Market and picking up dinner. Awesome. I rounded out the night with some Birra Moretti and pudding packs. And while chain food has a lot of flaws inherent in its very nature, I love the shit out of Boston Market (and Panda Express for that matter, someone needs to open a Panda Express in Manhattan. doooo it.).

Two nights ago, we drank Forties, Olde English, so Jules could knock that off the old to do list in her life, and I was instantly reminded of how old I am. Though it got better over the next hour or so, I forgot how bad it tastes. And how I'd rather drink beer from a glass with greasy food and friends than from a brown paper bag. Even if it costs me 5 times as much.

Stay tuned because someone is making one last run at Brother Jimmy's tomorrow, and it promises to be a good one.
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Lists

There's been a lot on my (figurative) plate these last few weeks, and though I've been eating I have not had a lot of time to write about it.


Things I have eaten recently:
Breakfast for family dinner (french toast, bacon, cheddar home fries, mimosa)
Brunch with the club at Virage
The worst pizza I have ever eaten
The saddest pizza I have ever made
Senior bar night
Freshman booze night
Sushi and Ice cream (and the idea of ice cream sushi)
Cinco de Mayo
Thai food with friends from Boston
Free food with the Star Trek experience
Free food at grad alley
Late night nosh with the parents
Graduation celebration with fish tacos and margaritas
Pine family hosted get together
3 course Thai meal parting gift
Chicken and rice part two
And it goes on and on and on and on
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