Shake Shack, London

After all the hype when both Five Guys and Shake Shack first landed in London (I heard rumours of 1.5 hour long queues!), I finally got round to trying Shake Shack on Saturday! Amazingly enough, the second Five Guys in England opened in Reading (we got somewhere cool for once!) so I have already been a couple of times, and despite what everyone else seems to think, I really enjoyed it, so was eager to see how Shake Shack would stack up!

Shake Shack is located in the Covent Garden Piazza, and has mainly outdoor seating (with heaters so you can still get your burger fix in winter!), plus a small indoor area for those less hardy burger fans. You queue on one side to place your order (they have a theme park style queue barrier - that's when you know a place is popular!), get handed a buzzer, then when it goes off you go and get your order at the collection window.

I decided to go for the double ShackBurger (cheese, tomato, lettuce and Shack sauce) as I wanted to try the Shack sauce - I also went for cheese fries and a vanilla concrete with chocolate hazelnut brownie and hot fudge sauce. Concretes are a Shake Shack special and are basically frozen custard mixed up with loads of delicious toppings! James chose the double SmokeShack - cheese, smoked bacon, chopped cherry pepper and Shack sauce - normal fries, and a single sticky toffee concrete, which had vanilla custard, chocolate toffee, chocolate chunks, salted caramel sauce and malt powder.

The double Shackburger

Cheese fries

The full tray!

A lot of my friends thought I might not like the chips here as they might be too crispy for my taste, but I thought they were great! They were crispy on the outside but with a fluffy inside so they avoided the ultimate crime of being chip shells. The cheese sauce was thick and rich; the only other time I have had cheese sauce over actual cheese on chips was at Ed's Diner and I hated it, but that merely speaks volumes about Ed's Diner rather than me not liking cheese sauce, as these were excellent! Also the chips somehow didn't get soggy!

The burger was also really, really good. To start with, the bun - it was soft and squidgy and exactly the right size so you didn't get sauce all over your hands. The burger was also really juicy, pink in the middle and had an almost barbecued taste (not burnt BBQ from a bad summer fete, a really good BBQ!) and the lettuce was fresh and added a nice crunch. I ate my tomatoes separately but they were plump and juicy!  The only thing I wasn't so keen on was the Shack Sauce - it was a bit of an unappealing shade of pink, and it was too mayonnaisey for my liking. Next time I'd just use the mustard and ketchup which are helpfully already decanted into plastic dipping pots for you to take!

The double SmokeShack

I think James' burger looks possibly even more appealing than mine - maybe to do with the lack of vegetation and purely cheese and meat here?! He thought the same as me and really enjoyed his burger; the only thing we differed on was that he thought it beat Five Guys hands down, and while I agreed it probably was a better burger here, I don't think it outstrips Five Guys by as much as everyone else says!

Finally, onto the concretes. I was really excited to try these!

Silly James didn't take a picture of his as he was too impatient to start eating, but you can kind of see it in this one! Next time I will impose much more stringent photography rules on him.

The sad thing for me was that James' concrete was about a million times nicer than mine! It was amazingly smooth and sweet, but the salt in the caramel meant it wasn't overpoweringly so. There was lots of chocolate topping in his too, which was what mine sadly lacked - there were only about 3 bits of brownie! So my verdict on Concretes is that they can be absolutely delicious, but choose wisely!

My overall opinion is that Shake Shack is a must visit. It's pretty expensive for fast food, but equally it's good quality, fun, and really really tasty! See their Covent Garden website and menu here.