Not everybody in this country is born and bred NYC and environs.
This is their own story:
Shake Shack sprouted from a hot dog cart in Madison Square Park in Manhattan to support the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s first art installation. The cart was quite the success, with Shack fans lined up daily for three summers.
This started in 2001! Jeez fella, I was 51 then and STILL haven’t actually seen one even though they are supposed to have one somewhere in Atlanta. We can’t all be so blessed to be from NYC or thereabouts.
Meyer is from St. Louis, but ran a number of very successful, very high end restaurants in New York. Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Tabla a bunch of others, all wildly successful.
Shake Shack is his first mass-market venture, and because of the price point he’s putting them in wealthy, hipsterish towns where people don’t mind overpaying for things for the sake of being trendy. He is a self made billionaire in the restaurant trade though, which is not something a simpleton can do.