Beiruting News

Beiruting.com Interview with Shake Shack's restaurant Culinary Director,Mark Rosati.
Below you can read the Q's & A's.

How does it feel like to be in Lebanon for the 1st time and to visit the iconic restaurant Shake Shack ?

It's very exciting and fun, I'm  very excited because we have a couple of Shake Shack's in the gulf region,& the best food I had in the region was inspired by Lebanese cooking , so I really started becoming a big fan of it, & one of my favorite things to eat is "Shawerma" all the time actually , it's kind of disappointing because in America we don't have it as good as it is in the region.

When I found out that we're opening Shake Shack here, I was like oh great , we can go to Lebanon-Beirut and actually eat the stuff where the inspiration came from , and bringing Shake Shack to Lebanon is a very big exciting opportunity .

Now you as the culinary director of Shake Shack, How did you get here, how you started your career?

This is actually not my original job when I studied, I was actually working on filming television back in the States, and what I loved about filming television was  to be creative, to think and have fun & when I found about the food business it gave me the similar creativity , I never went to school for this, I just went to a lot of restaurants when I was younger, and I'd always buy books & watch TV shows about cooking and cook for my friends , and the more I did this, the more I became passionate.

What Kind of dishes are the most fun for you? what's your favorite one ?

I love our concretes

Concrete is something very unique to Shake Shack , what we do is we take a frozen custard freshly made of ice cream , and we make our ice cream more fresh with our special machine across the world ,what's great about that is, it stays creamy & tasty, so you can have that in a Milkshake , as a scoop or a Concrete which we take our custards and try with different sauces and mix it and one of my favorite is "Chocolate truffle cookie dough" ,  it's very creamy & the best richest brand you've ever had.

How would you describe your cooking philosophy?

Well I say , keep it fresh , keep it inspired & keep it simple .

What do you love most about your job?

It gives me the opportunity to travel , meet some really incredible people , eat some incredible food , and I take all  this experiences and I internalize them as I create new menu for different Shake Shack's and different communities or cities or nations and so on...and all this comes to my creativity .

And I tried to do something very unique that I wanted to be inspired and meet people and see different walks of life, because we want to be the community gathering place from all different walks of life .

Now as we know the menu includes all the Shake Shack classics, including the burger that has swept the region-the ShackBurger,what makes the shack burger so special & tasty?

So ShackBurger is us taking again like a lot of great components , so to us ShackBurger is the almost the perfect burger , we add a great piece of lettuce to it , it's very freshy and it gives the Shack Burger a refreshing bite and then we add two fresh sweet tomatoes , and we have the salty seared beef , and the last thing we add to it is our Shack sauce .

After Lebanon,what are your plans? where are u heading to?

I am going to Dubai , we're actually launching a new Burger , which should be very exciting called the "Smoke Shack" , and then from Dubai I'm going to Istanbul , and we have 4 Shacks there now , I want to visit there and see if things are still good  and then I might go to London .

Describe us Shake Shack in few words.

Hospitable , Delicious & Comforting
Shake Shack it's a big warm embrace between the cool delicious food & hospitality of our staff.

By : Sola Kozian