At Shake Shack’s private soft opening in the Central West End on Friday, a short line snaked out the door onto Euclid Avenue. Bundled in coats and hats, patrons waited in the 30-degree temperature for a chance to snag some of the first bites at the New York-founded burger chain’s first Missouri location.
Inside the L-shaped space, an efficient line moved smoothly past three menu boards. The St. Louis location, at the corner of Euclid and West Pine, offers those popular Shake Shack staples: flat-grilled burgers, crinkle-cut fries, and ice cream concretes.
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But any St. Louisan will be pleasantly surprised by the St. Louis-centric items crafted for the location. There’s the Mound City Double, a Provel cheeseburger topped with smoked Niman Ranch bacon and a special “STL sauce,” as well as a handful of concretes with mix-in ingredients from local shops. (We opted for the chocolate chip cookie variety, made with Winslow’s Home chocolate chip cookies and Askinosie dark chocolate chunks.)
The L-shaped space features high- and low-top tables, crafted by CounterEvolution, which are made from reclaimed bowling alley lanes. The modernly designed chairs are made by Uhuru and also use sustainable materials. The wooden-slate booths are made by Staach. And two communal tables are from local woodworker David Stine.
The chain debuted in 2004 as a kiosk inside New York City’s Madison Square Park. In February 2016, Shake Shack’s founder, St. Louis native Danny Meyer, announced that he was bringing a location to his hometown. So what took so long?
“Shake Shack didn’t start growing outside of New York until about five years ago,” Meyer told SLM last year. “But then, once it did, every time it was announced that it was coming to another city, I would get swamped with emails, tweets, and phone calls asking me if I had something against my hometown. People don’t realize that it wasn’t until fall 2014 that we opened west of the Eastern time zone, in Chicago. Just over a year later, we’re coming to St. Louis. Chicago was a big test for us, and it did well—it did great. I think my own team got sick of me saying, ‘Can we go to St. Louis now?’ The answer was, ‘Of course we can, and of course we will,’ but we had to have that team in place, so the St. Louis store happened as fast as it could have.”
The wait is nearly over: The restaurant officially opens next Monday, December 11, at 11 a.m.
