stack | smash burgers photography & creative direction. lisbon.
The place
Lisbon has no shortage of smash burgers. The format arrived, the city ran with it, and now there are enough of them that the differences matter. Stack is the one that keeps coming up.
Three partners built it: Malcolm Granath, Swedish-Swiss, twelve years in Los Angeles; and Louis Bayle and Paul Cukierman, French, eight years in the city. They started in 2023 with a pop-up at Mirari, two burgers on the menu, a small space. Word spread fast enough that within a year and a half they had a proper restaurant on Rua Jacinta Marto in Anjos. A third location near Gulbenkian followed in early 2026.
The product is deliberately unfussy. Potato bread baked daily, meat ground to order, pickles and sauces made in-house. Three burgers on the permanent menu, a rotating monthly special tied to a different American state. The restraint is the point. Everything that goes in has been thought about; nothing is there for decoration.
The work
Volet came in at the Anjos opening, shooting the launch night as the restaurant found its footing in front of a crowd for the first time. That first commission set the visual register: direct, unromantic, American in spirit. Flash on the grill, the counter, the room filling up. The work documented a beginning.
From there came two further shoots at the same location. Packshots built out the product library. The lifestyle work went in a different direction: raw flash portraits of people mid-burger, no posing, no flattery. Stack has a no-apologies mentality about what it is and what it serves, and the images matched that exactly.
The final shoot moved to the new Gulbenkian location in February 2026. Packshots produced specifically for Stack's presence on Uber Eats, Glovo, and Bolt Food, delivery platform imagery that had to work hard at small sizes, against white, without any of the atmospheric context the restaurant itself provides.
Louis in front of the Anjos counter
The impact
The Anjos images were picked up by Timeout Lisboa and Lisboa Secreta. No coordinated press push. The work ran because it held up.
Find Stack on Instagram at @stack
