The #MeatLiquor effect: did dirty dining all start in a Peckham car park?

Chris Pople explains how one van man cooked up the perfect recipe for London’s tasty burger revolution
Team spirit: The original #meateasy above a pub in New Cross (Picture: Haarala Hamilton)
Chris Pople28 August 2014

Usually the most difficult aspect of telling an origins story is deciding where to begin. Fortunately, in the case of MeatLiquor, the start is easy to mark, and is handily time-stamped and preserved for posterity on a number of food blogs.

There’s a pleasant appropriateness to this, because the account of how Yianni Papoutsis and Scott Collins came to be the standard bearers of the London burger revolution is almost as much about their harnessing of social media and the collective power of bloggers as anything that comes covered with cheese in a sourdough bun.

I said almost. In summer 2009, before the hype, the queues, #meateasy, MeatLiquor, awards, books and a nationwide rollout, Yianni Papoutsis — then working full-time as a technician for the English National Ballet — set up a food truck in a carpark next to an industrial estate in Peckham. And from almost the first day he had fans — lucky Peckham locals willing to queue in all weathers for what were whispered to be the best burgers in London.

A friend of mine, tipped off by a commenter on her food blog, went down one lunchtime to see what all the fuss was about and ended up being served a green chilli cheeseburger the like of which had previously only really been seen Stateside (specifically at Bobcat Bite, New Mexico) — pink, minced chuck steak, seared on a fierce heat, chillies fried first in butter to release flavour then sealed inside a layer of cheese, the whole lot slipped inside a couple of slices of sourdough. Familiar ingredients, a straightforward process, but done, seemingly for the first time in Britain, exactly right.

Why had nobody done it before? It could be something to do with Yianni’s approach to sourcing ingredients (obsessive doesn’t even begin to cover it — he told me once he went through hundreds of different processed cheeses before settling on the one they currently use), his formative time cooking for the freaks and anarchists at the Burning Man festival in Nevada, and, most importantly, that confrontational MeatWagon attitude, all dive bars and bluegrass, lowdown and dirty.

Irresistible: a MeatLiquor burger (Paul Winch-Furness)

Even from the first days the MeatLiquor style was there. A new book, the MeatLiquor Chronicles, published on September 18, features recipes — including some from Burning Man — alongside stories, essays on beer cans, discussions on no-reservations policies plus fanciful biographies and what is apparently correspondence from literary agents and publishers. It captures that wilfully alternative approach perfectly — fun times, great food, with just a touch of the illicit. A beguiling combination.

So Yianni’s fame increased, and yet so often fans fell foul of his, shall we say, elusiveness. Moving around south London, from car parks to pubs to random stretches of public highway, the MeatWagon never had a permanent base, never really had a single permanent menu item, and was never particularly good at announcing either of these things in advance. Yet despite that (or even because of it), the queues grew and grew. By the time a vaguely regular residency at the Florence pub in Herne Hill came about, the crowds had become so used to the slow service — certain items regularly selling out early, a general air of disorganised chaos — that even those coming away empty-handed after waiting in line for two hours still only found themselves vowing to get there even earlier the next week.

It was at the Florence that I fell under the spell. I queued for just under an hour and by the time my number was up, they’d run out of the special boiled/pressed bacon patties (inspired by San Diego burger joint Hodad’s) and I was unceremoniously presented with a plain cheeseburger and £1.50 to make up for the difference in price.

And much as I wanted to hate it, after the queueing and the hassle and the fact they’d run out of bacon, one bite reduced me to a groaning, cooing mess. It’s easy to forget now, as it was then, that beneath all the hype and fuss Yianni makes quite extraordinary burgers.

The powerfully seasoned beef, the gooey cheese, the meat-steamed buns that hold firm to the last bite: I could try to explain to you why all the elements hang together so exquisitely well, but there’s a certain amount of black magic at play — it works, but nobody’s quite sure how. And they still aren’t — the book makes it very clear that some recipes, such as that for the Dead Hippie, which is printed covered in the black lines of redacted text, will never be shared.

The journey wasn’t without its hitches. The first MeatWagon, a flimsy old thing that always looked like a stiff breeze could have reduced it to flat-pack, was vandalised and destroyed. Its replacement, a more substantial beast that included such luxuries as deep-fat fryers — meaning Yianni could do fries for the first time — was itself eventually nicked (the crime report response letter from the Met is reprinted in Chronicles).

But by this time the Florence residency and a partnership with its operations director Scott Collins meant an opportunity came up to set up above a grand old Victorian pub in New Cross and to make use of an abandoned Italian restaurant while the space downstairs was being refurbished.

The new venture, #meateasy, was only ever meant to raise money for a new MeatWagon so Yianni could get back on the road again selling his burgers. It’s easy with hindsight to say “of course it was always going to be huge”, but at the time nobody was sure if even a handful of people would travel to New Cross, let alone queue in the numbers that had become the norm in Herne Hill. But while the queues at the Florence occasionally trailed around the pub garden, at #meateasy people were soon waiting in line all the way down New Cross Road.

The larger kitchens allowed an expanded menu, featuring wings (using a hot sauce made in Peckham), chicken burgers and chilli dogs (a collaboration with Big Apple Hot Dogs, another beneficiary of the MeatWagon Effect). Behind the bar were the guys from Soul Shakers, selling cold beers and cocktails to the burger-lovers waiting for a table.

A new ticket ordering system, a necessity due to overwhelming numbers, meant the buzz and bluegrass soundtrack was regularly punctuated by serving staff (sorry, “burgerettes”) shouting out order numbers above the din.

It was a uniquely exciting place to be; it felt like London had been waiting for #meateasy. The archly knowing hashtag in the name, the power of burger fans on Twitter and yes, the number of food blogs that kept everyone talking about the place, meant, in the words of Collins, “it went off like a frog in a sock”.

After four crazy, great, greasy months, and a wild final night closing party involving a tattooist and a 5am finish, #meateasy was no more. But its work was done — and then some. It had proved that the desire for down-dirty American comfort food burned just as strongly on this side of the Atlantic as the other, and inevitably a next generation of burger bars began growing across the capital, each treading the same path from street food to bricks and mortar.

By the time MeatLiquor opened in a dark, gritty space under a car park near Bond Street station, Londoners had Patty & Bun, Honest Burgers, Dirty Burger, Bleecker Street, Burger Bear, and even the Americans tried to get in on the act, opening Five Guys and Shake Shack even as Scott and Yianni were also expanding centrally (MeatMarket) and into the East End (MeatMission).

The rest of the story is perhaps best told by those responsible; who knows how much of the MeatLiquor Chronicles, their book in collaboration with DBC Pierre, is truth or artfully spun lies; part of the cult of the MeatLiquor (or “rhymes with cult”, as Yianni used to say) is staying partly in shadow and partly in light. To this day, nobody outside of a handful of people knows which cheese Yianni uses, the percentage of fat in the mince to get the patties so juicy, even quite who bakes their buns. All we do know is where it all started, in a wobbly food van in that windswept car park in Peckham, in the summer of 2009.

Latest London food trends

1/9

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in