Shake Shack is adding breakfast sandwiches to the menu at their original New York location. Pray for nationwide next.
Fast food restaurants and their slightly more reputable fast casual peers are learning the same lesson moms and doctors have always tried to teach us: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Shake Shack recently added breakfast — egg sandwiches, coffee cake, apple turnovers — to the menu at another location, in what appears to be the slowest roll out of all time.
The Shake Shack breakfast menu has three classic items: the sausage, egg and cheese sandwich, the bacon, egg and cheese sandwich and the egg and cheese sandwich. If you’re feeling ravenous, you can order any sandwich with two eggs for a small up charge.
As reported by Business Insider — with tantalizing food photography — the breakfast sandwiches are served on the classic potato bun, which the taste-tester, Hollis Johnson, describes as “an interesting move.” He seems pleased:
"And it ends up being a good move, at that — the soft potato bun translates to breakfast flavors remarkably well. One bite in, and one immediately realizes that this is a step above any normal fast-food breakfast sandwich. The fried egg is real — that’s right, a real egg, no glutinous swatch of pale yellow. The yolk reaches the sweet spot between runny and firm, and the cheese is rich and velvety."
If the reviews are to be believed, the sausage and bacon sandwiches are just as exceptional. The bacon, egg and cheese even has a record-setting four pieces of bacon. Over at Eater, Nick Solares claimed “the bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich approaches the sublime versions sold from the city’s myriad bodegas.”
Which is interesting, because Solares was reviewing Shake Shack’s top-notch breakfast options back in December 2016. While breakfast at the original Shake Shack location is indeed new, they’ve offered a breakfast menu at “commuter locations” — i.e. Penn Station, Union Station, Grand Central Station, JFK — in New York for years. (The Grand Central Terminal Shack started serving breakfast in 2014.) Here’s hoping it doesn’t take three years for them to expand outside New York.
Not every burger stand can or wants to be McDonald’s and so it follows that not all burger-adjacent breakfasts can last all day. At Shake Shack, the breakfast menu is available from 7:30 to 10:30 a.m. Monday through Friday and 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. Saturday and Sunday.