Shake Shack’s new veggie burger tastes like actual vegetables

Sometimes, it turns out, it’s OK to let vegetables be vegetables. After years of fast-food chains looking to boost their vegetarian and vegan options by debuting menu items containing high-tech, plant-based meat alternatives that mimicked animal flesh, some of them have gone back to the category’s roots. That’s the case with Shake Shack, which recently began selling the Veggie Shack, a sandwich whose patty is unapologetically made of … vegetables.

As in, bits of things you might encounter in your neighborhood grocery store – sweet potato, carrots, mushrooms – along with farro and quinoa.

Shake Shack’s old-school approach to a veggie offering is similar to that of Chick-fil-A, which is testing a plant-based alternative to its signature bird. The new Chick-fil-A item swaps the usual chicken for marinated and breaded cauliflower, resulting in a sandwich that pretty much tastes like what it is.

Some other brands’ forays into alt-meats haven’t been as successful as they hoped. Most prominently, the McDonald’s test of a McPlant burger containing Beyond Meat underperformed, and the Golden Arches reportedly dropped it indefinitely last year. Burger King’s Impossible Whopper, which debuted in 2019, had vegans and vegetarians wary when they learned the disks of soy-based protein were often prepared on the same grills as the beef ones.

But let’s get back to Shake Shack and the land of patties formed from actual, identifiable vegetables. I ordered the Veggie Shack (with a side of cheese fries, because let’s face it, I wasn’t really going for health food here). It arrived in the chain’s usual paper sleeve, which I like – it helps hold a sandwich together, as does Shake Shack’s practice of leaving the toasted potato bun attached at the “hinge” side (even if the buns themselves are controversial).

Its preparation is familiar to anyone with a passing familiarity with fast-food burgers; there’s a slice of melty American cheese along with pickle disks and a dollop of “ShackSauce” (a mayo-ketchup-mustard blend spiked with dill pickle brine). One distinctive feature: The sandwich also features a tangle of fried onions atop the whole thing.

I was particularly impressed by the patty. At first bite, I thought, “Mmm, tastes kind of like a regular cheeseburger!” – which was an impression probably helped along by the sensory cues I usually associate with a beef version that were lighting up my mind’s burger grooves.

But after focusing on the vegetable-medley star, I realized it wasn’t just a second-rate dupe of a fast-food staple, but rather a juicy, deeply-flavored veggie burger in its own right. I tasted earthy mushrooms and nutty grains. Beneath the griddle-browned exterior, the interior revealed diced bits of vegetable (I could spy a full pearl of farro and flecks of sweet potato, as well as bits of green that I think were scallions).

This isn’t the bean-patty puck from your hippie grandma’s co-op, either: It manages to be neither dry nor mushy, the twin pitfalls of veggie burger-dom. And while the fried onions added a layer of sweetness, they weren’t still crispy enough after a car ride home to offer much in the way of crunch.

A good (and straightforward) fast-food burger made from plants? Maybe not so impossible a mission after all.

My one complaint about the Veggie Shack is that perhaps the wizards at Shake Shack HQ thought a little too inside-the-clam-shell-box when developing the new offering.

The chain simply swapped a vegetable patty in place of the usual meat in a classic formula, resulting in a pretty good sandwich. But it feels like a missed opportunity to instead craft a new sandwich around the different flavor profile of the dish’s star. Since the patty has its own vegetal flavor, which is decidedly different from the minerally, beefy notes of a real-meat version, maybe it deserves its own distinctly complementary preparation?

But that’s probably not the point, which was to give the brand’s fans a vegetarian version of a tried-and-true burger. Before the Veggie Shack, the chain’s only meatless sandwiches were a grilled cheese and a fried portobello mushroom filled with molten cheese.

In creating meatless options, fast-food chains have also faced the challenge of appealing to a wide range of consumers: Vegans can’t eat the Veggie Shack because of its cheese, sauce and the eggs listed as an ingredient in the patty, presumably as a binder.

The cheese-topped McPlant suffered a similar fate. And it might be that “burgers” such as the Veggie Shack and those made from alt-meats aren’t aimed at the same customer. The lofty aim of Beyond and Impossible and their ilk has always been that they want to be a plant-based option for die-hard meat-eaters who wouldn’t usually be drawn to a veggie patty, as well as people who regularly eschew animal products.

But for those of us who contain multitudes (I like both beef and vegetables in equal measures, and for different reasons), a down-to-earth sandwich such as the Veggie Shack is a welcome option.