Coffee & donuts.

I am normally staunchly opposed to stuff in my ice cream. Ben & Jerry's has never been my favorite, in large part because they tend to add a whole slew of stuff to their flavors. For most, this is a prime attraction. All I see, though, are pint-sized minefields of over-frozen pretzels and chunks of chocolate, all chilled for far too long and at far too high a temperature to actually taste like anything. Bleh.

But. But, but, but. At Shake Shack, the special flavors that have, well, stuff in them are different. For starters, the custard is soft-serve, and so the added bits and pieces are in no danger of freezing to the point of tooth-cracking stiffness. And since everything is made fresh, the add-ins have just enough time to integrate, but not enough time to assimilate. In short, you can chew on and taste everything, as opposed to eating around chunks of chocolate hard enough to shatter your enamel.

I like.

And I especially like this month's special flavor for Saturdays: Coffee & Donuts. The coffee custard is rich, creamy and just a little bit salty, in the way that all of the most delicious sweet things are. The donuts are a light cake, and have a slightly maple flavor to them. They're soaked in the custard, but are a bit spongy instead of just soggy - kind of like (you guessed it) a donut that you've dunked in really good coffee.

Go forth and enjoy, free from the fear of the deeply frozen pretzel.

Shake Shack, 4 PM, 9 April 2011

Pancakes and bacon custard. My take? Too salty, not maple-y enough. I feel like a traditionalist-slash-provincial, but there you have it.

Super creamy, though.

Better together.

Salty and sweet, that is. There's little I like more than a dish that combines salt with sugar, and Shack Shack's salted peanut butter hot chocolate is no exception. It's deeply chocolatey, and instead of just adding extra richness, the peanut butter actually cuts through the sweetness with its salty edge.

There's not much more to say, other than that the beverage, which comes in one perfect size, is available at all Shake Shack locations around the city. You're bound to be near one sooner rather than later, right?

Right.

Movin' on up to the east side.

Some very exciting news was unveiled in yesterday's Dining & Wine section of the New York Times: Shake Shack has signed a lease for space at 86th and Lexington. That would be, oh, three blocks from my apartment.

Am I excited? You bet your bum I'm excited! A delicious, relatively cheap, well-made burger and fries within walking distance? On the way home from the subway, no less? Next to a bookstore?

2010 is looking up, my friends.

Shake Shack, take two.

On Tuesday, I got a treat. My friends Lori and Liam came to visit me in New York. They live out in Connecticut and only make it into Manhattan a couple of times a year, so to have a full day in the city with them was tons of fun. Of course, I had a challenge in front of me: how to feed them in an appropriately memorable manner, given they only visit me once in a while?

Well, since we'd decided to make a pilgrimage to the Museum of Natural History (I wanted Liam to see the blue whale, who has entranced me since I was his age, and Liam wanted to visit the Horse exhibit), I thought it was the perfect opportunity to make my first visit to the new Upper West Side outpost of Shake Shack.

I began visiting the original Shack way back when it was just an over-the-top hot dog cart in Madison Square Park, and have made regular visits to the permanent Shack since it opened in 2004. When word came out that a new Shake Shack was opening uptown, I figured it would be a fortress of screaming children and aggressive Upper West Side stroller moms. It is.

But it's also got the same delicious food and friendly service you'll find downtown. There's not enough seating to go around (we snagged a table for two for the three of us, and Lori ate standing up, good woman), but you almost don't care. The burgers are flavorful, the pickles are thick-cut and refreshing, and the buns are squishy and soft without being tasteless.

Golden fries and thick shakes (the chocolate is particularly good) round things out. All in all, we were three satisfied customers on our walk over to the museum.

And the whale is as cool as ever.

Spring has sprung; let's put veggies on our hot dogs!

If you've lived in New York for any reasonable amount of time, there's little to no chance that you've not heard of Shake Shack, Danny Meyer's Madison Square Park outpost. The Shack started as a summertime hot dog cart serving the area's office workers (myself included - I worked at Eleven Madison Avenue from 2002-2004) with ingredients prepped in the kitchens of Eleven Madison Park and Tabla, just across the Avenue.

Since 2004, the Shake Shack's home has been a permanent hut in the southeastern corner of the park, surrounded by gravel/dirt and innumerable little green tables and chairs. The bare bones accomodations and exposure to, alternately, rain, wind or blinding, burning sun do nothing to keep the crowds away. On a 45-degree day in March, the line for Saturday lunch stretched for an hour.

Today (75 degrees and sunny) I was lucky enough to arrive early, and only waited about 25 minutes before placing my order at the window - a Chicago dog (organic hot dog with cucumber, pickles, onions, lettuce, tomato and hot pepper), fries, and a Concrete Jungle (frozen custard with bananas, peanut butter and hot fudge mixed in). By the time I got a table and sat down to wait for my food, the line stretched to the west side of the park - a good hour and a half.

You used to have to lurk by the window waiting for the Shack's staff to call your name, and then fight your way through the aggressive types blocking the counter to claim your burger. (The counter-blockers are the same people who stand RIGHT NEXT TO the luggage carousel in the airport, effectively preventing anyone else from getting their own bags off the thing.) No longer. Now, like Chili's and T.G.I. Friday's before them, the Shake Shack has implemented a buzzer system, so it's easy to grab a table and enjoy the sunshine in peace.

Five minutes later, my buzzer did indeed light up and shake, cueing me to fetch my food from the nice people in the Shack. I grabbed some napkins and some mayo for my fries, and then tried to figure out how to eat my Chicago dog with one hand while talking to my mother on the phone. Turns out, not so easy, since the dog is piled high with fresh and pickled veggies. The cucumber adds a nice note of freshness to balance out the hot, pickled pepper. Celery salt takes the whole thing to a new level of savory goodness - really, it's much more than you typically expect in a hot dog. Reminds me of my friend Kirsten, who used to make this shockingly tasty meal out of the tasteless veggie burgers in our kitchen cafeteria. They had a slice of tomato, some mustard and mayo, some salsa, and a couple of other things. Sometimes throwing the kitchen sink at something actually works.


Shake Shack makes excellent fries - crisp but meaty, and tasting distinctly of potato rather than oil. Not much else to say here other than have them.

The concrete was disasppointing...I suppose it's possible that the extremely melty consisteny was my own fault, since I only tackled it upon finishing my hot dog and fries. But I don't think so. I only spent about 10 minutes on those, and there's no excuse for something this huge and expensive ($6.25 and about 10 oz.) melting that quickly, since it would have taken me more than ten minutes to eat it, had I been able to. As it was, I pretty much fished out the banana hunks and tossed the rest. I'll give it another go later this summer, but I'm not sold.