Danny Meyer

Origins and early life

Daniel Meyer was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, on 14 March 1958, the son of Morton Meyer and Roxanne Harris, and a grandson of the Chicago businessman Irving Harris. His parents came from prominent, civic-minded and secular Jewish families, and he has described growing up in a Reform Jewish household whose idea of Judaism, in his words, meant no bar mitzvahs and a Christmas tree.

Work and career

French was spoken at the family table, his father was one of the first American agents of Relais & Châteaux, and the small family-run inns of their trips through France and Italy shaped his idea of hospitality. After graduating from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, he learned the trade as an assistant manager at Pesca in Manhattan and as a kitchen apprentice in Italy and in Bordeaux. In 1985, at twenty-seven, he opened Union Square Cafe at Sixteenth Street and Broadway, the first restaurant of what became Union Square Hospitality Group, followed by Gramercy Tavern in 1994 and Eleven Madison Park in 1998.

Shake Shack began in 2001 as a hot dog cart raising money for the revival of Madison Square Park, and in 2004 it became a permanent kiosk in the park selling hamburgers, fries and frozen custard made the way he had liked them as a boy in Saint Louis. It was the first of his restaurants to be reproduced as a format, opened its second location across from the American Museum of Natural History four years later, and went public in 2015, when it had 79 locations.

He set out his idea of enlightened hospitality, which puts a company's own people first, in Setting the Table in 2006, and returned to it in What Could Possibly Go Right?, published in September 2026. He has served on the boards of the hunger charities Share Our Strength and City Harvest, and helped lead the groups that revived Madison Square Park and Union Square, the two parks where his restaurants grew.