The restaurant was spun-off from the Seattle-based pop-up Rough Draft Burger Shop,[8] which was "itself a spinoff from a fancy ticketed dinner and event series".[9][10][11][12] In 2020, White Center-based Good Day Donuts worked with Rough Draft to serve smash burgers on glazed raised doughnuts.[13] Rough Draft was slated to open in Lower Queen Anne in the summer of 2021.[14]
In Portland, Rough Draft operated in a red-colored food cart at Uptown Beer in southwest Portland,[15][16][17] and later rebranded to Sure Shot Burger and operated outside Oakshire Brewing. Nick Jarvis, Will Kuhns,[18] and Aaron Wilcenski have been chefs.[19]
Reception
In 2020, writers (including Karen Brooks and Bill Oakley) ranked Rough Draft's single cheeseburger third in Portland Monthly's list of the city's twenty best cheeseburgers.[20] Oakley also said Rough Draft had some of his favorite burgers in his 2021 "guide to dining" in Portland.[21] Wyatt Fossett of the Daily Hive said the burgers "are so deliciously dynamite that we will forever rave about the punchy flavor and lack of complication".[22]
Naomi Tomky included Rough Draft in Thrillist's 2021 list of the fourteen best burger establishments in Seattle.[8] Michael Russell ranked Rough Draft second in The Oregonian's list of Portland's thirteen best smash burgers.[19] Sure Shot ranked first in the best burgers category of the newspaper's Readers Choice Awards in 2024.[23]
In 2023, Jashayla Pettigrew included Sure Shot in KOIN's list of the city's seven best smash burgers, based on Yelp reviews,[2] and Axios Portland included the restaurant in an overview of Portland's best burgers.[4] In Eater Portland's 2024 overview of the city's "best, beefiest" burgers, writers said: "Sure Shot is a burger shack in every sense of the word. The burgers here are simple, but hover near smash-patty perfection." They also said of the double burger, "As a whole, it has all of the trappings of a fast food burger, if a fast food burger was even richer, cheesier, and had twice the amount of caramelization."[3]
^"Neighborhood Eats brings you 3 great pop-ups to hit up around Seattle". The Seattle Times. 2020-06-10. Archived from the original on 2023-05-04. Retrieved 2024-10-14. Longtime friends and industry veterans Aaron Wilcenski and Nick Jarvis started hosting elaborate pop-up dinners as Rough Draft 206 in early 2016, adding Rough Draft Burgers to the mix earlier this year. Now you can find them at Ballard's Fair Isle Brewing every Saturday and Sunday — along with the occasional Friday at Good Day Donuts in White Center — slinging classic diner-style burgers plus cold and hot vegetable options.
