Americas cult burger Shake Shack are not worth the hype

The first thing I do when I go to a new country? Try its trashiest food.

Whether it’s greasy street vendor treats or fast food burgers, you’ll find me elbowing my way to the front of the queue, wallet and liver at the ready.

On a recent cruise from the Europe to the US, I didn’t even make it to America before I bought myself a famous Shake Shack ShackBurger. In fact, I got one into my gob at my stopover in Dubai Airport, Escape reports.

But I was shocked to discover it was … a big disappointment.

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On first glance, it’s a good-looking burger. It comes in a neat little paper pouch, which makes it easy to pick up without dripping. The bun looked fine – nice and soft and pillowy, and I liked that it had a whole leaf of frilled lettuce and rather than the usual shredded iceberg, and fresh-looking tomato. So far so good.

I bit into it and the beef was fine – good flavour, and the solid cook on it even gave it a little crispiness to the edges. Nice touch. But once I chewed and swallowed the full bite?

Something was missing.

I took a few more exploratory bites and realised what it was.

The burger sauce was all fat and salt – no acid or sugar. It urgently needed some pickle, or gherkin or ketchup or something to balance out all that bland mayo.

Later, I looked up the supposed recipe for the ShakeShack Shacksauce.

The exact recipe is a company secret but copycats have included these ingredients in their attempts to recreate it: mayo, mustard, ketchup, cayenne pepper and dill pickle brine.

I’d argue that either there isn’t enough of the last ingredients, or dill pickles (rather than, say, the gherkins that you find at McDonalds) lack enough of the sugar that a good burger sauce really needs. The balance is off.

(P.S. I bought another Shake Shack ShackBurger in New York a few weeks later to make sure I hadn’t tried a modified Dubai version and nope. Exactly the same). It’s a mystery to me why this burger is so revered when there are so many other burgers on offer.

The Better Burger

Deflated, I needed to find a better burger. Once more I went hunting in an airport, this time in Dallas, Texas, in the few hours I had on my stopover before flying home to Australia.

The Texas-based Whataburger is much harder to find than Shake Shack – it’s only available in Texas and surrounding Southern states. But if you can get your hands on it – do.

Their entry-level burger is called, simply, the ‘Whataburger’ and it contains a beef patty, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles and diced onions, with an option to add cheese. In fact the chain is all about customisation so you can add whatever you like (bacon, jalapeños, etc) but for the purposes of scientific endeavour I stuck to the basics.

The Whataburger doesn’t have the ShackBurger’s demure grace: it’s a much larger, sloppier burger. There’s no fresh-looking whole lettuce – it’s that shredded iceberg – and the tomato looks a bit limp. The meat seems fine, and I later find out it’s fresh not frozen Texas beef, so that’s a tick.

But you know what it has most of all? Flavour. Tons of it. It comes from the sweet tanginess of the mustard and the diced onions, while the fat and salt comes from the American cheese.

The balance is bang on.

And who, I rhetorically put to the folks at Shake Shack, is eating a fast food burger and breaking it down into its ‘freshness’ components anyway? We’re not doing farm-to-table here guys. Fast food is about big gulps of gooey, delicious flavour. That’s it.

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And Whataburger nails it. What. A. Burger.

If you’re going to waste precious calories and artery space on great hunks of American fast food, you may as well do it right.

This article originally appeared in Escape and was reproduced with permission

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