Five Guys opens in UAE
Cult US burger brand plans expansion
It’s burger time again. Bet you didn’t think there were any more cult burger joints left to import to the UAE, right? Wrong. Sunday saw the opening of Five Guys, originally from Virginia but now spread throughout the US thanks to its utter simplicity: Red-and-white decor, a menu briefer than Miley Cyrus’ skirts, and a friendly approach to toppings (they’re all free!).
“It’s just a little hamburger place!” Jerry Murrell, the founder of Five Guys, told me over the phone from Virginia in a charming drawl that lends itself to understatement. “We’ve been selling the same thing since 1983, just hamburgers and fries.”
The five guys of the name are Murrell and his four sons, who started the chain together with his wife and a plan to do things their way.
“For a long time we had a sign in our store that said ‘If you’re in a hurry for a burger, there’s a whole lot of really good burger places close by’, because we’re not fast.”
They’re also not price-driven. “We just stayed away from that completely. If people didn’t want to pay for what we were selling, then we said we just didn’t want to do it. Once people eat our hamburgers it’s fine,” said Murrell.
The restaurant, at one of Dubai Mall’s busiest intersections (the exit to the fountains next to Social House), serves just a handful of “better burger” offerings. (Better burger is used to distinguish the likes of Shake Shack, Elevation, In-n-Out, which emphasize in-house-made dishes with a focus on freshness and quality, as opposed to chains such as McDonalds and Burger King, which use frozen or shipped-in dishes.) Murrell says Five Guys owns about half the better burger market in the US.
On the menu, there’s a hamburger (Dh34) and cheeseburger (Dh40), both of which have two patties of American beef; for a smaller portion, the Little hamburger, Dh24/30, has one patty. Murrell’s choice shows how customisable it is: A Little hamburger with raw onions and nothing else (“I’m the only one in the organisation who eats a burger that way”). If you don’t want a burger (who are you?), there is a hot dog, or a grilled cheese sandwich; fries are Five Guys Style or Cajun. Milkshakes get free mix-ins (peanut butter, cherry, banana, etc) and fountain drinks get free refills.
