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At this point, are you still with the company to cook or are you more in it to travel?

MR: I almost feel like they’re intertwined at this point. Going to a new city is still very exciting, because part of what we do is try and localize our menu and try to be inspired by what’s around us. Take it in, absorb it, and if we can, reflect a little bit of that back through Shake Shack.

For instance, L.A. Two years before we opened up, I came out here on a long weekend, because I had not been here in a long time. Through my travels elsewhere, I met so many wonderful chefs like Michael Cimarusti, Jon & Vinny of Animal, or Nancy Silverton, and a lot of them would say, “We love Shake Shack. When we go to a city that has it, we go.” I remember one time, I saw Jon & Vinny in Philadelphia, and they said, “Right off the plane, we didn’t go for cheese steak. We go for Shake Shack.” I said, “Dude, that’s amazing. Thank you. I’ve got to get out to your city and eat your food.” That’s what precipitated that trip. I ate so much food over three days. The first place I went off the plane was Son of a Gun and I had the legendary chicken sandwich. It blew my mind. The last meal: chi SPACCA. Now I’m full and going to chi SPACCA. Nancy Silverton was there that day at the bar. I got to meet her. The chef – Ryan [DeNicola] – was such a wonderful person. He was telling me about all his favorite restaurants. I feel a kinship. When we started to come out to L.A. to work on the menu, I had a list of this many people I wanted to work with that I had long admired. I wanted this Shake Shack to feel like someone in Los Angeles opening up a great burger stand inspired by Los Angeles, but at the same time, reflecting our roots and being who we are as a roadside stand from New York. IT was a hard bridge for us to gap. I feel like we did a successful job. The first shack we ever built that was white. We worked with people like SQIRL and Nicole Rucker from Cofax and Compartes Chocolate. I felt we built a very special shack that feels L.A. I think that’s exciting.

When I’m traveling, my mind is still very much on Shake Shack. Even when it’s on vacation, I’m still thinking, if we open a Shake Shack in this city, how would it be different? It helps me, as I go to a new city, get under the layer of it, and not be on the very top, where it’s touristy. My mind is trained to right away get to all the local stuff, where if I lived there for four years, I would know about, after I’ve gone through, “I’m a tourist, I’m a local, what would I find?” I find I’ve developed a way to understanding cities right off the plane. It’s healthy. If you want to travel, cooking and traveling for me are one in the same. Traveling for myself, I still want to go to all the great restaurants and understand them. Working for Shake Shack, I want to figure out how to create food that’s inspired by that city. It’s kind of an interesting way of doing it, but I think they’re very much interconnected for me now.

JL: When Shake Shack adds a dish or drink to the menu, who’s part of the decision making process, and what is the process?

MR: The process starts with a trip out to that city. Usually myself, or I have two other people on my team, that might make the trip. It’s two or three days eating around, drinking a lot of alcohol, trying to find local beer, whatever’s unique to that city, that I can’t get anywhere else, that’s top of the list. We start to internalize it. What would we like to have on the menu? We just start reaching to people.

Here, I reached out to Jessica at SQIRL. “Your jam is legendary, but you were the first person to have me eat crispy rice for breakfast.” My friend ordered it, and he said, “You’re got to get this crispy rice dish.” “You get the crispy rice dish. I’m getting breakfast. I’m getting eggs.” I took a bite because he forced it on me and I said, “I’m a jerk. This is the best. Thank you.” I was completely blown away by her vision, her ethos, that I needed her on the menu. I reached out to her and said, “I would be so honored if we could work together in some way.” We started to talk about what that might look like.

After it starts to conceptualize together, then I present it to a few people on our team. Our CEO, Randy, our head of marketing, our head of operations. I just want all the thinkers in the company to weigh in from their different departments, to take a look at the idea. I know myself. I get easily excited about anything. I start getting tunnel vision. “This is the greatest thing ever.” I just want to make sure everyone else feels the same way. If they do, then when we tell the story, they just have that buy-in. I feel like the ingredient or menu item or vineyard or brewery we’re using, if everybody has the same passion I do, I know we have gold. Again, they’ll be that much more excited to work on their end to help bring it to life.

JL: How did you decide what would end up on the breakfast menu?

MR: We kind of wanted to take our savory menu, like our burgers, and create sister items to that. The first thing we thought, “How great would it be to take a freshly-ground sausage patty and smash and griddle that like we do with our burgers? Have that same crust.” Then the potato bun, we’re synonymous with that, but we didn’t let that stop us. We got in bagels, Bays English muffins, everything we could get our hands on, to really feel confident we were serving the best breakfast sandwich we could. I came up with a lot of different sauces and toppings, but at the end of the day, we realized an egg cooked well and perfectly melted cheese on a buttery bun, doesn’t need anything else. We offer condiments on the side, because I know some people want ketchup on a breakfast sandwich. We want you to have that. We looked at the Shack burger. We start off with a great burger itself. As long as the heart of it’s good – we’re using cage-free eggs here, we’re using all-natural sausage, the bacon’s all natural; it’s double-smoked for us by Niman Ranch – we have some really good base ingredients we’re starting out with, so if we keep it simple and layer it – one of my favorite things to do is intentionally put cheese between the egg and the sausage so it stays molten and the juice of the sausage keeps it massaging the cheese. Bite into it and it’s creamy. Again, we try and make simple done really well. At the end of the day, if you want to add Shack sauce or mustard or ketchup, and just dunk it in there, it’s going to be awesome, of course, but if you’re a purist and think, “I just want egg and cheese on a bun, nothing else, how’s it going to taste?” We want to be confident it’s going to be a good experience.

JL: What are your three favorite burger collaborations that you’ve done with chefs around the world?

MR: That’s a good question. What I love about them all, when they’re done at the height of the collaboration cycle, you see Shake Shack and you see the chef at the same time in the burger and taste both. All of the burgers we’ve done with chefs – and we’ve been very fortunate to work with some of the best chefs in the world – they’re all special and unique and hit that hole.

When we had this big party a few years ago for our 10th anniversary at Madison Square Park, I invited five friends to come down and cook burgers with us. We created mayhem in New York City. We sold 1000 burgers a day, six-hour waits. We had Daniel Boulud because what he’s done for burgers before we even started at DB Bistro with that truffle short rib stuffed burger, it rekindled everyone’s love affair with burgers. After that was David Chang, chef Andrew Zimmern, and Daniel Humm. That was our actual anniversary day. We were born at Eleven Madison Park. When Shake Shack started, we were in their dining room grinding beef, making the sauces, making the toppings. Every was made from scratch in that kitchen and wheeled out in a cart across the street every day to open up. We had to have Eleven Madison Park because that’s our home. The last chef was April Bloomfield. She was very special to me. We opened the same year, Spotted Pig and Shake Shack in 2004. Talk about two very iconic, defining hamburgers in America. Two very different styles, both starting the same year. Our blend is different. Her blend is different. Our architecture is different from ours. We griddle ours. She grills hers. If you come to New York City – forget I work at Shake Shack – if you ask me where to get burgers, you have to get Shake Shack, Spotted Pig, and I would throw Minetta Tavern in there. There’s just so much variety and difference. That’s the lexicon of burgers in New York, and that’s also influenced the world. Her burger was April, super simple. There’s bacon. There’s cheese. It’s rich and it’s yummy. To work with someone who has created and done so much with burgers from the same time we’ve been around, that’s an honor.

My three favorites? David Chang. The burger that he originally wanted to do was going to either going to be a shrimp burger or mushroom burger. He didn’t want to do pork because everyone knew he would do a pork burger. “I know these other chefs, they’re going to do pork. I want to do something different.” I brought burger meat anyways. I brought cheese, I brought sauce, I brought bacon. He wanted to do a shrimp burger, and one of his guys said, “Why don’t we cold smoke the shrimp burger and put that on top of a burger? That’s the bacon. It’s bringing richness, umami, and smoke.” All of a sudden, everyone in the kitchen became children and became all excited. “Go next door to the Noodle Bar and get the pickles.” “We’ve got some onions downstairs. Go get it.” It was a pure collaboration born out of the process, in the moment.

Sat Bains in London, a two-star Michelin chef in Nottingham, he’s from Nottingham, home to Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood. He created a burger inspired by the forest. This is pretty wild. He used blue cheese from where cows were grazing in the Sherwood Forest. He made a smoked aioli taking oak from the forest and using it to smoke the aioli. He took pine from the forest and make pine needle salt to season the patty. He went foraging and found porcinis and made mushroom ketchup. It tasted like the forest, but at the end of the day, ketchup, mayonnaise, pickled shallots, blue cheese, it tasted like a simple cheeseburger, but there was a little something extra. There was simplicity in Shake Shack, but this beautiful umami like sauvage thing going on there. The genius of Sat Bains.

JL: What about the third burger?

MR: Kind of in that same vein, I would say in L.A., Jon & Vinny. They helped us when we came here and let us do pop-ups with them. We wanted to return the favor. Our opening year was super successful. They gave us a home and gave us so much love coming out here that we wanted to return the favor. We brought them out to New York last year and had them do their sandwich – that famous chicken sandwich that I fell in love with on my first trip out here – on our chicken and our bun using their slaw and aioli to get a total Son of a Gun/Shake Shack mash-up. It was then, it was us, just celebrating our love of L.A. with two influential, amazing chefs. I’ll always love that one.

JL: When you do travel, how do you decide where to eat?

MR: It’s personal. I feel like I want to eat something I can only get in that city that’s very iconic. If I’m coming here, I feel like I want to get a French dip. Then there are so many wonderful chefs doing eccentric stuff. That is beautiful too. I just want to find something I can’t get in New York, first and foremost, and I also want to try everything else. Burgers and pizza. I’m a big fan of that stuff. First, I want to feel like this is the only place in the world where I can be sitting here having this experience. That’s what I crave.