Burger Shot's Florida Push Is 12 Counters

On 23 October GameSpot reported a partnership between Rockstar and Skinny Louie, a smash-burger chain with restaurants in Miami and New York: from early November the chain’s Florida stores convert to Burger Shots, the Burger King stand-in from the GTA series, and stay converted until 31 December. The announcement was made on the two companies’ Instagram accounts rather than on Rockstar’s Newswire, which is why the wording is worth reading closely. The sentence that travelled says every Skinny Louie location in Florida — and the qualifier inside it is Florida.

The chain publishes its own count. Its locations page, read on 26 October, lists fifteen open addresses: nine in Florida and six in New York. So the conversion covers nine of fifteen sites, 60 per cent of the company, and it stops at the state line. The six New York stores — NoMad, West Village, Upper East Side, East Village, Penn District and Park Slope — keep the real name, even though the state being rebranded is the one the game’s Leonida is modelled on. Two further Florida addresses on the same page, Las Olas in Fort Lauderdale and Doral, are marked “smashing soon” and are not among the nine; if both open before 31 December the Florida total reaches eleven, ten of them street restaurants.

The arena half of the count is larger than the first reports suggested. When the two brands appeared at the Kaseya Center on opening night, coverage described two concession stands, one for each. The Miami Heat’s own Vice City page lists more: Burger Shot at sections 105, 120, 308 and 324, Cluckin’ Bell at section 325. Four burger counters and one chicken counter. Skinny Louie’s page for the same address prints five section numbers and describes the unit as “4 locations plus a full milkshake bar”, which reconciles the two inventories — four stands and a bar, with the arena’s list supplying the sections the four stands occupy. Eight street restaurants plus four arena counters puts the Burger Shot estate at twelve from early November. Cluckin’ Bell stays at one, inside the building.

Twelve counters is not a state. Five of the eight street restaurants are in Miami-Dade — Wynwood, Little Havana, Coral Gables, Aventura and South Miami — two in Broward, at Dania Beach and Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, and one in Palm Beach, on Clematis Street in West Palm Beach. Three of Florida’s 67 counties, spread along roughly seventy miles of the south-east coast, the same stretch that already holds the arena. The two unopened sites do not add a county. Whatever a summary means by statewide, the footprint is one metropolitan area and the two counties immediately north of it, and the reason is not mysterious: that is where the chain already trades.

What converts is signage, packaging and uniforms rather than food. GameSpot, citing people at the arena, reports that the Burger Shot burgers are the same Skinny Louie burgers the building already sold, now in GTA6 wrappers. That is the ordinary shape of a licensed brand conversion, and it makes the legal position worth stating plainly. In July 2023 Take-Two’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist to Smokin J’s BBQ in San Diego days before Comic-Con, cancelling a planned Burger Shot pop-up; the restaurant ran its Cluckin’ Bell night as “Don’t Cluckin’ Tell” instead, as Rockstar Intel and Dot Esports reported at the time. Three years later both brands are licensed, and one of them is served from twelve counters.

The dates do something the coverage did not. The food promotion ends on 31 December 2026, forty-two days after launch. The rooftop sign above the same arena runs to 22 September 2027 under the county agreement — the later of one year from installation and the Heat’s final home game of the 2026-27 season, which this site set out on 23 September — so the licensed food brand disappears roughly nine months before the licensed lettering does. Four things remain unpublished: who pays whom and in which direction; whether 31 December binds the four arena counters, given the sentence was written about the restaurants; whether Cluckin’ Bell ever leaves the building; and whether the two coming-soon stores join before the window shuts. A promotion with a printed expiry date and no printed terms is the fair description of this one.