I've been going to Shake Shack since the days before it expanded out of NYC, and I remember it…read morewell.
This isn't a review of Shake Shack not living up to its past glory. Maybe it's the story of a place just having a bad night. But I suspect it's about a business that has lost its way.
Saturday was a rough day for the family, so we decided we were in need of some comfort food for dinner. What's more comforting than burgers, fries, and a shake?
Part of me wanted to go to my favorite new-to-me regional midwestern spot. But a colleague of mine, whose taste I deeply respect, recently told me he still thought Shake Shack was at the top of the smash burger game. And he's a big Wisconsin stan.
So I decided to give it another shot.
Yes, it was sad to see how much the place had fallen. Where once customer service was key, barely anyone made eye contact or acknowledged our existence in the restaurant. The experience was like ordering on an app, getting takeout, and eating in the car. Actually, that might have been more pleasant.
The ordering kiosks were in a state of disarray. There were no table numbers where they should have been, which led to a hunt for table numbers at the end of the ordering process, unaided by staff. To be fair, this was my first time using one of the Shake Shack screens. Not a fan for a longer list of reasons I won't bore you with here.
It might be better to order on your phone, which I hate more than I can possibly say. I try to spend as little time on my phone as possible and interact with as many actual humans as I can. There were registers, but they weren't staffed. And there was very little signage to help think about your order while you waited.
After ordering, the only table available was dirty with old caked on ketchup, I didn't see anyone coming around cleaning any tables during the entirely of the time I was there. I tried to scrub the old ketchup in the moment with water and a napkin and got some of it up.
This isn't a case about first impressions, because ultimately the food was the biggest let down.
Both orders of fries were kinda warm, but not hot. And if you are going to take the calorie hit on fried foods, they should be hot and crisp. I would also argue there isn't nearly enough cheese on those cheese fries. But that could just be a personal prejudice from my years in Philly where cheese fries are almost a religion.
Oddly all the burger patties seemed to be cooked to different temperatures. Some were quite pink, some had a trace of pink, and some were fully brown inside. That's not a big deal, but it speaks to a certainl amount of chaos going on in the kitchen.
My double shack burger was literally a soggy mess. I have no idea what happened. The bun was literally saturated in grease. Like legit soggy. Squishy. The grease proof wrapper was no match for this unfortunate mess of a burger and was disintegrating in my hands. It needed to be peeled off the bun in pieces.
Things were not all bad. The kid enjoyed the special milkshake. The sear and beefiness on the patties themselves was also quite good. Also both the pickles and the tomatoes on the burger were crisp and fresh.
I wish I could say the same thing about the lettuce, but that was wilted and kinda gross. Oh, and speaking of off-putting, there were far too many hard bits of gristle in the burger patties themselves.
If my family wasn't already frayed from the day, and had the food not taken so long to prepare, I would have said something in the moment to the management. But we were hungry, and if I sent the food back my wife would have lost it.
All in all I see that as a $55 lesson that I was correct about which burger place in town is the best. Maybe the shack can turn this around, but it might be hard seeing it's now a multinational concern.
N.B. I'm sharing this here because the link on my digital receipt asking "How did we do?" went to a mostly blank web page that reads, "Internal service error". This feels consistent in my recent experience with Shake Shack's level of customer service.
