Danny Meyer on Building Shake Shack & His New Bestseller, “What Could Possibly Go Right?”

I am. And I'm so grateful for your willingness to go a little bit late here.

It's been quite a day. Landed here from LA and then just on the way to lunch got great news, which is my book just hit the New York Times bestseller list.

Totally very, very exciting. And of course the restaurant where I am right now, Cotogna, was so great at sending us stuff.

Yeah, exactly. Bet you do.

Well, they did something really amazing. Literally like 15 minutes after I got this news, they brought a new paper placemat to the table that was their placemat, but on top of it it said, 'Congratulations, What Could Possibly Go Right?'

Only through my daughter, Hallie.

I think we met maybe for a second outside of Caffè Panna.

A long time, like before the pandemic. I think she introduced us, though I could be wrong, but I'm almost positive that's the case.

Oh my gosh.

We definitely spent a couple days in Queens, but I remember... Actually, I do remember going there now.

Yes.

What I remember more of, though, is going to the Jackson Diner and a bunch of little restaurants that he liked to take me to.

But I definitely remember that. We were the ones kids on the Spike.

He does, and you know, tragically it was... he believed, he told me, he believed that on the way back from Mumbai on an airplane is when he contracted COVID. We'll never know that.

Anyway, now Floyd was a remarkable human being, remarkable human being. He could be really frustrating. He was stubborn as the day is long.

But lovable as could be. Highest standards you could imagine as a chef. Tender. He was a lot of different things. He was never mean to anybody.

And yet he had incredibly high standards for all of his quirks. He was firm, but loving. And he was just a remarkable human being, and I miss him to this day. Wish I could give him a hug.

Truly, the only thing I didn't like about him was his cologne. Drove me crazy, because every time we hugged all the time, and I'd then smell like him for the rest of the day.

That's true. That's true. We can't upstage.

Tabla was October of 1998. And then we closed it in 2010.

Just shy of its 13th birthday, I guess.

Maybe it was 2011. I actually put the timeline in the book here because I really wanted to make sure... Yeah, Tabla closed in 2010.

First ever. First ever.

You know what? I've learned a lot about how to open restaurants, but I would have no experience on how to close one. And it was gut-wrenching to do it, but I really feel like our team did that in a way, the most human way possible, and we found a way to celebrate a great restaurant even though we all felt horribly about it. And interestingly, I guess it's sometimes like certain human lives, you don't really know how much they were loved until they go missing. And the number of people who to this day tell me how much they loved the restaurant blows my mind, and I always go like, 'Just wish you had come a little more often, then it could still be open.'

Yeah, I think you're right about that. I can tell you what I think we got wrong, but there's a lot we got right. And keep in mind when Tabla opened in 1998 there was no other place serving Indian food where the chef was from a four-star New York Times restaurant like Lespinasse, which Floyd was, using ingredients from the green market. You know, playing music that didn't sound like every other Indian restaurant, having cocktails that didn't taste like every other Indian restaurant. And it was a very different thing. And I think the context that many New Yorkers had at that point were, you know, the restaurants of Little India and the buffet lunches for, you know, $8.95 all you can eat. This was not that kind of a restaurant. Today, as you just said, it's a really exciting boom in Indian restaurants. So I think if we got one thing wrong, it's that the restaurant was too large relative to its potential audience at that point. Believe it or not, even compared to Gramercy Tavern or Eleven Madison Park back then, or the Modern, it had more seats than any other Indian restaurant — 230 seats on two levels with two kitchens and two bars. We saw that the fixed costs we had were just too great. You know, we had to be... I think our break-even point was $8 million a year, which is an awful lot of money annually for an Indian restaurant. And we exceeded that in our first five or six years, and then the next five years we were kind of teetering right around that break-even point, and then the last two years we were over six and a half million dollars, and we just kept losing money. And sadly now that coincided with the great financial crisis of 2007, 8, 9, and that's when I finally decided we had to throw in the towel.

I did. I did because I hated the idea of laying off 140 people.

And what I really should have realized is that the greater disservice was keeping them employed without giving them raises or promotions for two years. I was also feeling a sense of shame because every restaurant I'd ever opened at that point was not only surviving, but thriving.

I can't even answer your question. I'm trying to think about two that I could... I have to keep looking. The reason I did this timeline is as much for me as for anybody else, but I think there were probably about 11 restaurants at that point if you include... At that point we had two or three Shake Shacks. But I just prided myself on we could always figure this out — that what could possibly go right and not go wrong. And there came a certain point and there was just nothing else we could figure out at Tabla. You know, this is also a time when I remember Eater had this feature where they sent out their online newsletter called Death Watch.

It was a horrible... I think it was a horrible thing that they did it, actually, because it... but it's also horrible for someone like me to actually care about that and to take it so personally. That should never have been a motivation for me, you know. Here I can either get... watch this because what does that have to do with real people going to work every single day as cooks and servers, as bartenders, or the servers who are trying to make people happy and serve great food? That's completely beside the point. And the point of that weekly feature was almost to add shame into restaurants that were struggling.

I know you do.

Yeah, I mean I think that's a way that goes way beyond the food industry, what I think. Whether you're talking about the town piazza in Italy in the 1500s or you're talking about whatever online platform you may look at, bad news has always traveled much more quickly and broadly than good news. And I think that's the way... we all know that bad news sells clicks, and clicks sell ads, and unfortunately it creates a marginalized sense of what reality is. But it's my fault that I let that impact me.

It didn't take really more than a day, to be honest with you. Maybe two days because our frozen custard machine broke on our very first day. But remember we had had this hot dog cart that was just... it was an accident. It was part of a piece of art that we had hoped to bring to Madison Square Park by a Thai artist who had a vision of having four taxi cabs on stilts with a working hot dog cart beneath it that he designed. And they needed someone to operate the hot dog cart, and I prevailed upon our team to... I said, 'We should do, we should operate the hot dog cart.' It was an artistic statement of all kinds. And the team basically said, 'We don't have time to do this.' I said, 'Nope, we do.' We also had room in our private dining room kitchen, or rather Madison Square Park, to make these hot dogs. But the reason I really wanted to do it, David, was to prove to myself that hospitality as a... This was in 2001. I didn't write Shake Shack in a book till 2006. 20 years ago today, actually.

But in 2001, I was already thinking very deeply about the power of hospitality, and I believed that it was not just for fancy restaurants or full-service fine dining restaurants. I wanted to see if hospitality could work at a hot dog cart. So that's all I was trying to do — do something for the park, to bring people there, to keep it safe. And lo and behold, it went so well in the summer of 2001, the summer before 9/11, that even when the art moved on in the following summer, there was a new piece of art in the park that had nothing to do with this hot dog cart. The artist allowed us to strip his art off the outside of the hot dog cart, and we just... The community said, 'Please bring it back.' And so we did that in 2002. We did it again in 2003. And it was not till 2004 that we said, 'Let's turn this... see what happens if we turn this into a permanent kiosk.' And I called it Shake Shack.

Yeah, that was the whole point. You know, I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and I went to places like... as soon as I was 16 and got my driver's license, what we all did as kids, that was how we got into Hendrix or Motown. You know, otherwise the only way you could be in touch with your friends was phone rings, maybe your mom or dad picks it up. 'And what are you doing? What is that all about?' And you get 16 and we would all drive our car, ready to drive it somewhere. And we would say we were going to the library, but we were usually going to the parking lots of these... you know, it would be a frozen custard stand or shack. Ted Drewes or Fitz's root beer stand or Crown Candy Kitchen, Steak 'n Shake. And the parking lot was the thing that attracted us. The burger was great, especially, you know, late at night on a Friday night. But I just basically envisioned this to be one of those kind of places, and in New York City where we don't have an automobile culture, I said, let's just say the parking lot is actually a park. But it's still a gathering place just like the parking lot was. And so the shack was... that came to me really, really easily. I did, however, come up with some pretty bad ideas before that, but I picked the right one of all of them.

Well, when I wrote Setting the Table 20 years ago, there was one Shake Shack.

And there was only one Shake Shack for the first five years we were open. That's how much... This just shows what a happy accident this was. It was never created for the purpose of being a chain or being replicated or being a public company or being in 22 countries. It was... resistant when people love something. And they love working there and they love dining there, and communities are happy to have one in their neighborhood. Who are we to say no? But a big part of the reason I wrote my new book is I was really trying to learn how do you take what was really special with the one and try to find a way to replicate, not just like stamping out a unit. But really extending a feeling. And to the degree that Shake Shack is loved by people, certainly the flavor of the burger and shakes and fries is a big part of it, though. I think that Shake Shack will always win or not win based on the feeling that you get when you go there, which is based on the hospitality. Because we're not the first or last place serving what we serve on our menu.

1,132 as of this morning.

Yeah, it's just relative to some other chains we know, it's actually still a very small company. I know that sounds like a funny thing to say, though, considering there's over 40,000 McDonald's. We're like 1% of that. So I'm good. But that's not our goal. Our goal is to write a... write a scale culture. There's others who will always be better at us than scaling systems, but I want to scale the feeling.

She has a Midas touch, that's for sure.

No, I think it's a really good question. So with respect to Shake Shack, I didn't have a whole lot I needed to research because I was so familiar. It's a very simple menu. In fact, when we went from the hot dog cart to turning it into Shake Shack, I wrote out the menu, and I have a copy of it still. I wrote it out on the back of a piece of stationery. Probably took me 10 minutes, and to this day 90% of our menu is that. If you want to talk about research, the biggest research that I ever did was before opening Blue Smoke, our barbecue restaurant. And you know, we logged at least 60,000 miles going to barbecue regions all over the country. The research that had to happen with Shake Shack wasn't so much on the culinary front as much as it was we had never done anything other than having, you know, a chef and a sous chef and pastry chef in the kitchen and a general manager and maitre d' and host and service director and wine director in the dining room. And we never had this kind of a quick-serve experience where we're trying to offer the same quality ingredients we would use in other places. As a matter of fact, it was our friend Floyd who had first introduced us to Pat LaFrieda and his beef. And Floyd was the one who said that's the beef I would use for the hamburger. He was using it at Tabla and he was using it for our burger in Union Square Cafe already. But mostly we kind of knew what we wanted to try to do. I'll never forget there was a day that we were testing... Look, you go a burger, right? What the hell is it? It's a piece of meat, a bun, and some stuff on the bun. And so then the question is... stuff. How big is it? And we started thinking about things that we had never thought about before, which is how long does it take to cook? What's the largest burger that you can cook within a small amount of time where the level of doneness is not going to be an issue for people? Because people who like their burger cooked rare, medium rare, well done, that's how they like it. And we had to come up with a size where that was almost irrelevant. And we had to come up with a blend of muscle meat that was lean enough and yet juicy enough that if you like your meat rare you'd be satisfied even though it doesn't... something brittle here. So it was a lot in it, and then you're right, the bun. I'll never forget it. We finally felt that we had the meat blend right. We were doing all this cooking in the private dining room kitchen of Eleven Madison Park. Michael Romano, who at the time was... I think he had just stopped being executive chef at Union Square Cafe, and he was kind of the dean of all of our chefs. So he was helping with this thing, and he said, 'Great, we forgot to get the buns.' And I said, 'You're right. Well, let's just get something so we can see how this thing eats.' And I ran from Eleven Madison Park on 24th and Madison down to the Associated supermarket on 20th and Park Avenue South. And immediately in the hamburger bun aisle, I saw a brand that I liked a lot, which is Martin's Potato Rolls. And again, I didn't grow up with Martin's Potato Rolls, which are made in Pennsylvania, but I grew up eating those potato rolls in St. Louis from a place called Straub's. And so that's what I bought, and I brought them back, and we all just kind of got this huge smile on our face.

Lo and behold, all these years later, that was the right choice.

Yeah, they're hard to find, but you know, this was just another big thing. I know you're probably getting more than you wanted

talking about making a sausage here at

One of the things we really decided early on was that the hot dog, the Chicago-style hot dog we'd been selling for three years at the hot dog stand, hot dog cart, was $2.50. And that was important to us because we're in a public park. And so we also cost was that so going to be an issue here. And we wanted to make something that was highly accessible to as many people as possible. So the opening price of the ShackBurger was something like $4.95. And we decided we're not going to do any fancy-pants stuff with this thing. Very tempting, but we to use cheddar cheese and like a really good one, but nope. We're going to use American cheese. Very tempting to get a great Dijon mustard. Said, nope. We're going to serve French's mustard for people who like mustard on their burger. And those were really hard decisions because those were not things I ever would have done in any of our restaurants like Gramercy Tavern or even the Shake Shack Cafe. But I think we made most of the right calls.