A buzzy burger IPO is at hand, and -- stop me if you've heard this one before -- Wall Street is almost sure to cheer when it finally arrives. That's true even though it's the second "better burger" store to go public in only a matter of weeks.

The pending offering here is Shake Shack, the New York-based hamburger, fries and custard chain that's recently provided details on its plan to begin trading. It's in the right spot for a modern restaurant: A fast-casual, better-ingredients shop with big plans to expand. It's fairly new, with a beginning traced to a hot dog cart in 2001, but it's also got quite a founder, Danny Meyer of Union Square Hospitality Group, the operator of several fine-dining establishments. In fact, Shake Shack doesn't even want to be considered fast casual, a description that's already enough to get food business writers and traders in a frenzy, but instead to be viewed as "fine casual." We can only begin to speculate about what impact this will have.

Not every restaurant IPO of the past couple of years, fast casual or otherwise, has been a smash, as Noodles & Co. (NDLS) demonstrates. But in many cases, the hope and hype of finding a stock that's the "next Chipotle," the burrito seller that's had tremendous growth as a stock and a company, has meant a welcoming market. That's probable for Shake Shack, which, Bloomberg has reported, might be bidding for a $1 billion valuation.

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When thinking about how Shake Shack may be met, we have a notably similar case to consider from back in November. That's when California-based Habit Restaurants (HABT) arrived. Habit priced at $18, above the range that had been projected, then opened at $30, and in the following weeks went as high as $44.20. Lately, it's fallen back, trading around $31, close to where it opened.

Habit told investors it had $120 million in 2013 sales, 99 stores, mostly in California, and plans to get to more than 2,000 restaurants in the U.S. over time. Shake Shack is smaller, but probably better known because of the NYC headquarters and Meyer, the restaurateur who serves as chairman. Shake Shack had $82.5 million in revenue for 2013, 63 locations and a projection of "at least" 450 units in the U.S. as the years go by. Average annual sales volume at a Shake Shack restaurant is worth pointing out as incredible. It's $7.4 million at the Manhattan stores, and a lower, but still very impressive $3.8 million elsewhere.

Many burgers

Right now, almost half of Shake Shack's store count is in other countries. Even if many regular folks will just see it as a burger place and wonder what the big deal is, making the international growth such a clear part of its operation will sit well with investors who are always angling for the new, shiny stocks. And why wouldn't it look overseas? The domestic burger market is a tremendously tough place to stand out, and USDA data show Americans eating less and less beef over time.

That's not to say we're giving up on hamburgers at restaurants, because we're not. Food industry researcher Technomic has said burger stores had $72 billion in revenue, almost half of which was recorded at McDonald's (MCD), during 2013. Better burger names like Shake Shack accounted for around $2.4 billion of the total, so they're still small, meaning there's room, potentially, to get a great deal larger. Importantly, the common thinking is Shake Shack, Habit, Smashburger, Five Guys, In-N-Out and the like will draw in more and more diners searching for alternatives to the old guard.

Once we get more data from Shake Shack on the number of shares it will offer and what it believes the initial price will be, we can offer a better guess as to where it may trade in the early days. Until then, we have multiples on currently trading stocks as a guide to start. What do they show? Habit, for its part, is trading at about 215 times the next 12 months' estimated earnings. That's an astonishing number, even amid the fairly high multiples for other fast casuals such as Chipotle (CMG). The average forward price-to-earnings ratio on a set of five other fast casuals (not fine casuals, that is) is about 40. In terms of price-to-sales, Habit has a 2.1, much more in line with the 3 multiple on the fast-casual survey group.

Because Shake Shack is well known in New York, and because the business media and Wall Street are based there, it won't suffer from a lack of pre-IPO publicity. And, knowing anything at all about traders, it would be stunning if the shares didn't climb early on. But again, see Habit. That early hype can, and does, fade. And note that two Yahoo Finance columnists, Rick Newman and Michael Santoli, believe the Shack fad has run its course at least for people who live in New York, serving now primarily as a destination for tourists.

Maybe that's true. But if Shake Shack manages to replicate its first decade of success, it won't matter, not with several hundred other stores going up. That "if" is always the question, though, isn't it?