Lunch Matters

The Shake Shack burger is an inelegant construction. Poking out the top of its greasy wrapping, the contents push forward like the hanging belly of someone who can’t admit to a need for more roomy pants. Jealous of each other, the lettuce, onion and tomato jostle for position above the patty, which is itself oversized—a sloppy coagulation of beef held together by salt, fat and shining yellow American cheese.

It emerges ready-to-eat from the translucent pocket of slippery paper, a different, less stable approach than pedestrian sandwiches, which tend to lie prone, their bread horizontal to the plate. Scornful of gravity, the Shake Shack burger stands on end. It is a vertical lunch, and one meant to be consumed standing, or walking across the sands of Madison Square.

Like a birthday boy who’s had too many free shots, the Shake Shack burger is an embarrassing mess. But when it tells you it loves you, even if it’s slurring, it means it.

For all its haphazard glory, the burger is really just an improvement on the fast food standard, and as such demands no special treatment. The price reflects that—$4.25—even if the wait time does not. To eat Shake Shack in summertime is to massacre your afternoon, to sacrifice prime warm hours so that you can visit an awesome, endless line, where office workers huddle, body-warmth lost to hunger, and shiver in the skyscraper shade. It’s a tourist attraction. It should be in guide books.

But in Winter, though the weather’s worse, the line is manageable. Today—high of 35°—only 15 minutes passed from when I approached to shack to when I was able, gleeful, to fill my maw with meat. 15 minutes and $4.25 for a few hours of grease settling in my stomach. In June, I don’t think it’s worth it. But in January it should keep me warm all day.