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Shake Shack
Shake Shack began in 2001 as a hot dog cart inside New York's Madison Square Park, launched by restaurateur Danny Meyer as a temporary art installation-turned-food-stand to help fund the park's renovation, before its popularity led to a permanent kiosk opening in the same park in 2004. The original Madison Square Park kiosk became such a destination in its own right that lines regularly stretched for over an hour during peak times, and the company built a webcam specifically pointed at the line so customers could check wait times remotely before deciding to walk over. Shake Shack went public in 2015, and its rapid expansion from a single park kiosk into a global chain with hundreds of locations represented one of the more dramatic "elevated fast casual" success stories of the 2010s, part of a broader "better burger" movement that also included competitors like Five Guys and Smashburger. Shake Shack's combination of its genuinely unusual origin as a temporary park fundraiser and its rapid transformation into a publicly traded global chain has made it one of the defining success stories of the modern premium fast-casual burger category.
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The Apple Pan
The Apple Pan opened in 1947 in West Los Angeles, and the small horseshoe-shaped counter restaurant has operated continuously under the same basic format and menu for over 75 years, with no seating beyond the counter itself and a policy that's never accepted credit cards throughout its entire history. The restaurant's Hickory Burger, topped with a tangy barbecue-style sauce, has become its signature order, served by an unusually long-tenured staff of servers, some of whom have reportedly worked at the counter for multiple decades, a level of employee continuity rare in the restaurant industry at any price point. The Apple Pan has drawn celebrity regulars for decades specifically because of its unpretentious, unchanged format, and food writers and critics have repeatedly cited it as one of the last surviving examples of a genuine mid-century Los Angeles diner counter operating essentially unchanged into the present day. The Apple Pan's combination of over 75 years of continuous, unchanged operation and its status as one of the last surviving genuine mid-century LA diner counters has made it one of the most historically significant single-location burger restaurants anywhere in the country.
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