Burgers and Cupcakes
458 9th Ave, at 36th st.
Distance from Shake Shack: 0.94 miles
Travel Time: 27 minutes
Burgers and Cupcakes is humorous only to New Yorkers, who can't help but smile at the gall of building a restaurant that caters solely to the big apple's idiocy to stand in line for the most obscenely simple things. I was spurred to undertake the odysse...
Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop
174 Fifth Ave, at 22nd st.
Distance from Shake Shack: 0.05 miles
Travel Time: 2 minutes
You want close to Shake Shack? How about half a block from Madison Square Park? Charmingly vintage, Eisenberg’s is run by a big friendly guy who takes every order and scrawls it on a paper bag, sending it down to the far end of the restaurant...
New York Burger Co.
303 Park Ave. South
Travel Time: 2 minutes
When the grease fumes clear on this little quest for Shake Shack Alternatives , there is really only one place that deserves the mantle, and that is the New York Burger Co. A block away from the shack, NY Burger Co. provides the shortest walk, shortest line, and shortest wait, which all transla...
Bruce’s Burger
33th and 7th Ave.
Distance from Shake Shack: 0.79 miles
Travel Time: 23 minutes
Decked out in full 50's dinner kitsch, Bruce's Burger tries to conjure up the good times of the care free suburbs in the middle of Midtown chaos. It's billed in neon as a drive-in, which of course is impossible considering it doesn't even butt onto a street, being t...
American Burger
100 W 32nd St
Distance from Shake Shack: 0.53 miles
Travel Time: 16 minutes
Once I'd scanned both New York Magazine's and Village Voice's online restaurant section a few times, it was time to delve into some of the less charted and less proofread parts of the web. That usually involves a good Google scan and then devolves into hour lon...
The Burger Joint
241 Third Ave.
Distance from Shake Shack: 0.33 miles
Travel Time: 11 minutes
Not to be confused with its definite-article-less famous namesake, Burger Joint , which is famously "hidden" in the Le Parker Meridien, this joint is just a short jaunt over from Madison Square Park on 3rd Avenue and 20th Street and is home to some serious sliders....
Blue 9 Burger
92 Third Ave
Distance from Shake Shack: 0.61 miles
Travel Time: 18 minutes
Of all the burgers around the area, this one probably comes the closest to replicating the style of the Shake Shack. They are both in the same vein as the West Coast burger staple, In-N-Out Burgers, which are hyper-fresh and vegetable laden. Everything is made to order,...
Eating Nick’s we decided that our favorite pizzas don’t have a uniform cheese layer--as you take bites they change, from sauce and fresh basil to an all-mozzarella mouthful, and the flavors really develop in your mouth.
But we’ve gotten to the point where food can make or break the entire evening. We’d been having slice after pie after slice after pie, and they’d all been so abo...
Saturday and Sunday of this weekend were among the best days this year, second only, perhaps, to last Saturday, the proclaimed "Day of the Year" by Manhattan Users Guide with a delightful essay about the joys of walking New York's streets. Call this post the Brooklyn Users Guide--our own Day of the Year--spent soaking in a day dry and warm in the sun, cool and breezy in the shade.
1300 Crosby, Bronx, NY
We awoke promptly at 9. We decided this time to eat some breakfast before we left, slumped down into the plastic bench, and buried our head in books, our ears stuffed with headphones. The subway didn’t emerge from the ground until halfway through our ride into the Bronx, and we couldn’t see any traces of the large skyscrapers that grounded us to home.
Much like o...
