The New York Times had some rare criticism for Shake Shack in Tuesday’s edition of the paper. While reviewing the chain’s recently-opened Brooklyn location, new Times food critic Pete Wells took a swipe at the chain’s most venerated product:

How the burger could change lives I never divined, but on occasion it was magnificent, as beefy and flavorful as the outer quarter-inch of a Peter Luger porterhouse.

More often, though, the meat was cooked to the color of wet newsprint, inside and out, and salted so meekly that eating it was as satisfying as hearing a friend talk about a burger his cousin ate.

Wells mentions earlier in the piece that he is using “dozens” of Shake Shack experiences to form his opinion. But I found his point about the burger’s sodium levels surprising; I’ve always found the burgers served at the Shake Shack in Dupont to be entirely too salty. Headache-inducingly salty.

Even when the burgers were great, they could be great in one of two distinct ways. In the classic Shake Shack patty, a tower of ground beef is flattened against a searing griddle with a metal press and made to stay there, spitting and hissing, until one surface turns all brown and crunchy. A patty handled this way takes command of a Shackburger, standing up to its tangy sauce, its crisp lettuce, its wheels of plum tomato.

Sometimes, though, the grill cook hadn’t had the energy needed for smashing and searing. Instead the patty was tall, soft and melting, so pink inside that its juices began to soak the bun at the first bite. Good as this version was, it was anomalous.

Shake Shack wasn’t even consistently inconsistent. Once when I ordered a double burger, one patty was browned all the way through while the other was the color of a ripe watermelon inside.

Don’t even get Wells started on the Shack’s fries, which he called “pretty awful.” Wells concluded by awarding Shake Shack one star out of four. One bad review, even from the New York Times, means little. But with such competition for burger dollars — in New York or D.C. — and the chain’s Jeremy Lin-like standing in the eyes of New Yorkers and it’s worth mentioning.

For the record, Tom Sietsema is a fan of the D.C. Shack, and he included it in his picks for the city’s best cheap eats. He writes: “I’m partial to burgers that taste as if they came off the griddle of a diner, and by that measure, Shake Shack’s sandwiches deliver. The nicely pink, sufficiently juicy patty tucked into the lightly crisped bun is (fairly) fast food that pays a compliment to the genre.”

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