Shake Shack to Detroit

[EastsideAl]

I think it's a nice grab and upgrade for that space, and I think it will do really well there for a while. But I also think that folks around here may find their prices a bit high for a basic burger-fries-drink meal.

I still lived in NYC back when the original Shake Shack opened in Madison Square Park. My basic take on it was that it was quite good, but really just a slightly upscale version of a Dairy Queen Brazier [[or, better, somewhere like Culver's) in the end, with food that was also only somewhat better.

I always felt that what Danny Meyer had really conceived was a sort of Manhattan-filtered simulacrum of the burger and shake joints of his St. Louis childhood. Something perhaps unfamiliar to New Yorkers [[thus the extreme hype, and lines), but not all that unusual to folks like me from a lot of the rest of the country.

But, there's really no arguing with the concept's success. And after lining them up out the door at multiple locations in New York, it sure has become something of a national fast food phenomena over the past couple of years. Although it remains to be seen what kind of long-term "legs" fancy-ish burger stands will have outside of NYC, particularly as quality is inevitably compromised to meet the demands of expansion.