Aside from the Chick-fil-A at the Northside Dining Terrace, Shake Shack is one of the only sit-down fast-food restaurants on campus. Shake Shack is known for its high-quality food, delicious shakes and solid vegetarian options, which can be hard to find at large fast food chains, but they come paired with some decently high prices. They also have limited-time menu items such as the current black truffle burgers and fries, previously having Korean-inspired menu items.
So how are the shakes at Shake Shack? You would hope they would be good, given that they are the restaurant’s namesake. The shakes are all made with the restaurant’s own homemade frozen custard that is made daily, is spun fresh with each order and contains fresh ingredients such as cane sugar and cage-free eggs. The current shakes for this season are cherry blossom, brownie batter hot chocolate and Thai tea, and each is sold for $6.49 at the location on campus. They began offering these flavors at the beginning of this year and will stay on the menu until around April.
First up is the cherry blossom shake. This flavor is a returning one, having been offered previously in 2019 and 2020. This flavor also has been a recurring springtime offering at Shake Shack locations in Japan since 2016, where it is known as the “Shack-ura Shake.” The company describes the shake as “vanilla frozen custard hand-spun with cherry blossom topped with whipped cream and sprinkles.” When looking at the shake closely, you can see a sort of light pink and white marbling of the cherry blossom flavoring mixing with vanilla custard. The light pink sprinkles on top match the pastel color of the drink.
The first thing that comes to mind after tasting this shake is amoxicillin. The flavor is reminiscent of the medicines given to children– but in a good way. It does not have a medicinal taste but rather an intriguing sweet flavor. The shake tastes like being a kid; it is sweet and exciting. One small complaint with the shake is the sprinkles mixed into it. The occasional crunch of the sprinkles feels a bit out of place. An element of crunch can go great in a shake, but it does not feel like it matches the cherry blossom theme of the drink. This shake gets four and a half kids’ amoxicillins out of five.
The brownie batter hot chocolate shake is a new shake that the company describes as “brownie batter hot cocoa frozen custard topped with whipped cream and brownie crisps.” The drink looks like a typical chocolate shake with whipped cream and some brownie crumbles on top. The flavor of the drink tastes like classic Shake Shack chocolate. It has that rich chocolatey flavor to it, but it manages to taste like powdered hot chocolate. Honestly, this drink is disappointing. First off, with hot chocolate in the name, it is a missed opportunity to not add marshmallows of any sort into the drink. It has hot chocolate in the name, but marshmallow should be an obvious ingredient choice. But besides that, the brownie batter flavor was almost non-existent. The hot chocolate part of the drink seemed to be the shake itself, but the brownie batter component seemed to just be the crumbles on top, which does not seem like enough to be called a “brownie batter hot chocolate milkshake.” If you crumbled OREOs on top of a vanilla milkshake and called it an OREO shake, people would be mad, because that doesn’t make it an OREO milkshake. While this drink tasted good, it did not live up to the name. This drink gets three cups of boiling water out of five.
The Thai tea shake is also a new flavor described as “vanilla frozen custard hand-spun with house-brewed Thai tea topped with whipped cream and black sugar syrup.” This shake was a nice pastel orange with a pretty drizzle on the top. From the first sip, it was very tea-prominent: It is definitely not one of those drinks where you cannot tell that there is tea in there. In fact, it tastes very much like Thai tea in milkshake form. If you like tea, this shake definitely brings a strong flavor. It is important to note that this shake was thinner than the other two, potentially because they added tea itself into the shake, thereby making the drink thinner. So with that in mind, this shake gets four Happy Sunshines out of five.
The best option from this limited-time menu is the cherry blossom shake. Taken all together, though, these three shakes do a good job of representing this time of year, with the flavors telling a story of winter melting into spring.