‘Like a concentration camp run by KFC’: Tanya Gold visits Shake Shack

Shake Shack is a hamburger restaurant in Covent Garden market. It came from New York and it is as needy and angry and angry-needy as America itself; it is, I suspect, quite capable of inventing a bogus reason to invade Burger King while posing as a victim of Burger King’s evil machinations. ‘Good things come to those who wait,’ it says in its promotional material online. ‘See you in the queue!’ (That, if you are English and a man and have never had psychotherapy, is called passive aggression.)

Covent Garden market is full of August tourists; that is, wanderers with no destination, staring blindly at the metal Apples and Chanel. Their spiritual home is the queue at Madame Tussauds but, being tourists, they do not know it.

Here is it, near (or possibly in) that ancient milkshake joint where you could get, for a brief window in space–time, at least according to the London Evening Standard, a breast-milk shake — why didn’t that work out? Because we have burgers for our babies now; burgers, the ultimate entry-level food. Burgers have had a comeback. They are the meat equivalent of John -Travolta in the 1990s; they are Norma -Desmond’s last stand at Paramount studios. People are eating burgers — in Fitzrovia, in St James’s, in Belgravia, even in Mayfair. Why? Is it an ache for simplicity, a sort of cow-themed postmodern rustic movement?

Shake Shack is a small, tidy room with outside seating sprawling on both sides, towards Long Acre and the Thames. The chairs are emphatically cross, expensive and spindly, like the corpse of Anne Robinson: eat burger or hotdog or your own tongue; get out. You queue (the queue is being sold as a kind of unique London tourist experience, which is a proposition so stupid possibly only a cow would do it), stare at the menu, order at the till, and sit; when your order is cooked (or rather assembled), a mysterious electronic rectangle beeps at your table and you collect the food from a hole in the wall, as if you were in a very friendly, and effective prison, or a concentration camp run by KFC.