Danny Meyer (center), Shake Shack CEO Randy Garutti (left) and me at
BurgerMonday-on-a-Wednesday preview party, Covent Garden.
Photo by Simon Kimber.

Back in the early days of the Union Square Cafe, any difficulty first-time diners had reconciling the New York restaurant’s accolades with its informality rarely lasted through dinner. With a comprehensive approach to attentive service that would become his signature, owner Danny Meyer proved that a smart-casual, feel-good restaurant could be as accomplished as any multi-starred French one.

“For me it was never about the pomp and circumstance of the experience,” says Meyer, who was 27 when he opened the restaurant, his first, in 1985. “It was about what was on the plate and the generosity with which it was served to me. What led to Union Square Café was loving a bistro in Provence or a trattoria in Rome. I think Shake Shack is a successor to that.”

You may have to watch my short video interview at the bottom of this post to get what Meyer is driving at. Otherwise any similarity between a Roman trattoria and Shake Shack may be no more apparent to you today than it would have been to New Yorkers in 2004, when Meyer opened the fast-food kiosk in Midtown Manhattan’s Madison Square Park. This time, the difficulty for some was in reconciling the reputation of the visionary restaurateur behind not one but two winners of the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant in the USA, Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern, with that of a hot dog vendor in the park.

What could possibly have moved Meyer to trade in table service, cloth napery, impeccable cooking and 99 percent of all vegetables for split hot dogs and, later, smashed double cheeseburgers in paper wrappers?

Any head-shaking about Shake Shack did little to shorten the wait for hot dogs and especially burgers, sadly, some would say. Meyer’s high standing and standards gave even New York’s most sophisticated grownups cover to eat like kids again. Kids liked eating like kids, too, as they always have. Long queues begat longer ones, as well as more Shake Shacks in New York, up-and-down the East Coast of the USA and overseas (the Middle East and Turkey).

Now it’s London’s turn to be confounded by the Meyer touch. This Friday at 10am he opens Britain’s first Shake Shack in the Market Building of Covent Garden Piazza (sneak peek here.) His team has anglicised their operation, substituting Scottish Aberdeen Angus beef for American mince, incorporatingCumberland sausages in the selection of “flat-top” hot dogs and sourcing mix-ins for the frozen custard ice creams affectionately known as “concretes” from St John Bakery and chocolatier Paul A. Young.

But the made-in-the-UK push has its limits. The London Shake Shack will manage without its proprietary American beef blend from Pat La Frieda, the New Jersey burger meat mogul, but not without potato rolls from Martin’s. Those buns will be shipped to London from Pennsylvania. And much as Meyer is wishing for queues – Shake Shack wouldn’t be Shake Shack without them – he draws the line when it comes to using the British term queues. For him success at Covent Garden or wherever else Shake Shack ventures will always be measured in lines.

Cause and Effect

It’s been the effect, namely the queues, as much as cause, specifically the superior fast-food, that’s transformed Shake Shack into a cultural phenomenon. The iconic home of the great American hamburger used to be the drive-in, with large cars parked around the burger stand, rock ‘n’ roll blaring from their radios.

At Shake Shack urban pedestrians join a queue, instantly connecting with a random community of know-it-alls, have-it-alls and newbies who ought fear becoming one of them. Once you’ve stepped into the queue you’re on the inside and in position to broadcast out through texts and social media. Meyer could not have foreseen Twitter when he dreamed up Shake Shack, nor did he invent Instagram as an effective way to promote it. But the barrage of this is me on line at Shake Shack photos and here’s me with my ShakeBurger snapshots does make it look as though micro-blogging and photo-sharing were part of some ingenius business plan.

The global burger boom is much bigger than Meyer, much bigger than Shake Shack, much bigger even than burgers. In the past we went out to eat to go out to eat. Now we go out to, as Meyer suggests, go home, to, in a certain sense, return home: We crave comforting food that evokes memories, only we insist that it be special. Our shared desire is, to use my young&foodish mantra, food we know as we’ve never known it.

“People want the experience to be easier and more accessible than it’s ever been,” says Meyer. “People want it to taste better than they’ve ever wanted it to taste.”

With MEATLiquor, a burger joint atypically unfriendly to kids and teens (see: Father’s Office), Papoutsis, partner Scott Collins and their backers defied the laws of location ruling the restaurant and cocktail biz, transforming a cursed corner space under a bleak car park on the back side of Debenhams Oxford Street into the hottest spot in town. Its red-neon sign, spelling MEAT as if viewed through shutter shades, has drawn the hip and hungry like flies to a fluorescent tube.

But it might very well be MEATMarket and not MEATLiquor that endures as a case study marvelled at by future generations of students in property development. Its burger balcony is perched over a sea of I♥LONDON tat at Jubilee Market. Whereas MEATLiquor flourishes as fairground dark ride MEATMarket attempts the same in Covent Garden’s house of horrors – London’s trinket hell.

You can safely enter Jubilee Market from its Tavistock Street entrance and climb a flight to MEATMarket without rubbing shoulders with spotty adolescents from Milwaukee. There’s little risk of their following you up the stairs either: The kid-unfriendly message is delivered to parents by off-colour personal ads displayed in illuminated decorative panels and, less subtly, with the word “DICKS” on the men’s toilet door. (In three visits I did not see even one of the hundreds of teenagers below climb up for a double burger and fries.) Likewise, with protective netting stretching out from the gallery edge you can guzzle all the boozy shakes you want without worry of toppling down onto the flea-market floor. Otherwise, could you imagine the tabloid headlines?

MAN FALLS FROM JUBILEE MARKET MEZZANINE, IMPALED BY CRYSTAL REPLICA BIG BEN

Rising above the riffraff and eating not caviar but sloppy burgers may have its charms. You sit as as an upper cruster in a privileged position, devouring the groundlings’ greasy grub. But is this why Papoutsis and company chose Jubilee Market as the location for what may be the prototype for a chain of MEATMarkets? I doubt  it. Irony is not his thing. It’s more likely low rent had something to do with the decision. Or Frank Sinatra: “If I can make it there I’ll make it anywhere!”

In the burger department, my area of focus, the MEATMarket menu features only doubles, all £7.50 (not cheap): The Double Bubble (a standard double cheeseburger), the Dead Hippie (a sensational riff on the McDonald’s Big Mac) and the Black Palace (piled with grilled onions – nice!). My guess is that the “Black” in Black Palace stands for ground black pepper, so indiscriminate is its use. The beef patties in the three doubles I tried ranged from wet pink to dry brown, tender to slightly rubbery. At their best the MEATMarket burgers are not just over-the-top drippy. They’re over-the-balcony drippy, with enough onion soup spilling from the Black Palace to fill a teacup.

If, in conclusion, I’m finding MEATMarket difficult to love it has less to do with absence of consistency than loss of irony –  mine  – in this, the Great British Age of Great American Junk Food.

MEATMarket’s vanilla milkshake requires the assistance of a Dyson DC25 to suck through a fat straw. That’s amusing, even at £3 for a 10-ounce (.3 litre) serving. The thick truth is it makes you feel like a kid. But my question for food snobs who praise the structure of this or that artisan gelato while debating the merits of Tahitian and Madagascan vanilla pods is this: how can you dig up words of affection for a small cup of sugared brain freeze that tastes of nothing?

MEATMarket, Jubilee Market, Tavistock Street, London WC2E 8BE

“We believe in the flavour of spices,” reasoned Arora, composing a mantra for all Indian cooking.”

Monica Bhide, the food writer and cookbook author behind the terrific A Life of Spice blog, agrees. The feeling, she says, is that the marinades and curries penetrate the meat better without the skin. There’s no barrier to entry.

For the tandoor-grilled titari (guinea fowl) he adapted from a recipe for tandoor murg (tandoori chicken) in India Cookbook, a new 815-page bible of home-style Indian cuisine (Phaidon), Arora applies two marinades to the skinless bird. The first consists of malt vinegar, spices and crucially salt, which, in 45 minutes time, draws out the moisture from the breasts and legs, leaving their meat thirsty for the second massage: a penetrating, four-hour rub of ginger, garlic, drained yogurt, Kashmiri chillies, mustard oil and caraway seeds. The full-body treatment breaks down all of the guinea fowl’s remaining defences, achieving tender succulence for the finished bird and, for the finished dinner guest, total belief in the flavour of spices.

photo by Brian Jones

Anyone who came here looking for a Cinderella story will be disappointed: The lead character in this Covent Garden tale is less an Eliza Doolittle than a Danny Didmuch. His fall from grace is revealed on a cold and rainy Thursday in December, when the former food critic of a major daily newspaper and the author of seven books is spotted peddling potato pancakes to posh patrons dashing to the Royal Opera House for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s The Tsarina’s Slippers. The London latke lad cannot get too worked up about the ballet shoes of a Russian princess when his immediate needs are Neoprine wellies and an Astro-Thermo underwear suit.

When news of Didmuch’s predicament reaches as far as the California coast the response is swift and sympathetic. The food editor of a major metropolitan daily sends him an urgent email:

Dude, if it’s come to that, you really need to write for us more often. We’ll keep you off the street.

The story should conclude with that happy Hollywood holiday ending, except that the frozen-toed Didmuch gets great satisfaction serving his crisp, golden, King Edward potato pancakes to the cosmopolitan throng passing through Covent Garden piazza. The chance to feed London lunchers as well visitors from some 15 countries brings out his inner Jewish mother. The Japanese tourists in particular are wild about his latkes. Several come back for seconds, knowingly spooning dabs of sour cream or applesauce atop their pancakes like the old hands they observe doing the same. He cannot bear the thought of disappointing anyone who might return from noon-8pm on Thursday 10th December or Friday 11th December – the first night of Hanukkah no less – and not find their beloved latkes. (Latkes are cooked in oil and customarily eaten at Hanukkah to commemorate the miracle of the oil, when one night’s worth of sacred oil burned for eight nights.)

For his penultimate and grande finale performances outside of and downwind from the Royal Opera House Didmuch (aka youngandfoodish, né Daniel Young) is to offer the option of a deluxe Covent Garden latke topped with sour cream and crowned with pearls of salmon roe. He may not care much about the Tsarina’s slippers, but he does fancy her daddy’s red caviar. He invites you to join him on Friday at 4pm for a Hanukkah candle-lighting and lots of latkes for all to eat.

Mmmm, Mmmm, wouldn’t it be loverly?