MEATmarket

MEATmarket | MEATliquor

http://www.themeatmarket.co.uk

MEATmarket | London Eater

It’s hard to imagine a time when the only way you could wrap your mitts around a Yianni Papoutsis burger was to follow his free roaming food truck as it toured around London.

Most of all however, the pub kitchen allowed Yianni and team to churn out their fabulous products with great consistency, albeit at the cost of long cooking times.

These burgers were never gourmet and Yianni has always championed the greasy, sloppy, everyman junk food that burgers are really loved for.

Sometimes the burgers can be incredibly salty, other times incredibly bland, but when they get it spot on, the juicy, 100% chuck patties are peerless.

Presumably, this is what has led to the significantly reduced cooking times, since all MEATmarket burger options available are double patty variations.

MEATliquor

MEATmarket | MEATliquor

MEATmarket Covent Garden | London Bar Reviews | DesignMyNight

If there's ever been a place designed to make the perfect hangover food, then hands down it has to be the MEATmarket.

Serving up an array of belt-busting burgers, such as the famous Dead Hippie burger, this place aims to fill up every customer who comes through its doors.

An offshoot of the already successful MEATliquor in Soho and MEATmission in Hoxton, their third instalment want to serve you unashamedly fattening food that you know you shouldn't eat, but can't help going back for.

A slightly tricky place to find, search for some hidden stairs on Tavistock Street and once up there, you'll find a long room overlooking the market below and you're there.

More of a fast-food palace than a restaurant, you do need to order your food from the counter but with a commitment to quick and effective service, you won't be waiting long for that meal to help you on your way.

MEATmarket, West End

Hot on the heels of MEATLiquor's unexpected success, burgermeister Yianni Papoutsis has embarked on a new venture, this time overlooking Covent Garden's tourist-addled covered market.

MEATMarket fully embraces the fast-food concept, with garish décor, a high turnover and conspicuous absence of table service and reservations, while sticking with a winning formula of gourmet burgers, chilli fries and monster hot dogs, rounded off with lashings of Jaegermeister ice cream.

It's a down-market spin on MEATLiquor's much-lauded aesthetic, but no less enjoyable – if anything, the quickfire service is much improved here, and the birds-eye view from the mezzanine level is an attraction in itself.

Unashamedly trashy but unswervingly committed to high-quality, affordable burgers, MEATMarket marks a worthy chapter in the growing Papoutsis dynasty.

Gordon's Wine Bar - London Restaurant Reviews | Hardens

“Dark cave-like cellars” create a superb atmosphere at this epic old wine bar (dating from 1890) by Embankment Gardens, which also boasts one of central London’s nicest outside terraces (with BBQ in summer).

The “excellent choice of wine and sherries” is another reason the world and his dog flock to the place – the self-service pies, cold cuts, cheeses and salads are certainly no incentive to hurry along.

MEATMarket | Soho, Fitzrovia, Covent Garden | Restaurant Reviews ...

Meatliquor, London W1, restaurant review - Telegraph

In the present context, what this means is that by the time you get to read about some hot new trend in restaurant culture in a broadsheet newspaper, it’s unlikely to be either thrillingly new, or searingly hot: you need to frequent the food blogs for that.

In fact, for a good benchmark of how fashionable your chosen restaurant is, simply tot up how many of your neighbours are 25-year-old hipsters in plaid shirts and Clark Kent specs, earnestly murmuring into dictaphones and taking surreptitious photographs of their dinner.

The menu is terse and a bit shouty (vegetable options, including a hearty, herby Greek salad made to a recipe devised by Yianni’s mum, are grouped under the heading “rabbit food”; a sublimely good reinvention of the Big Mac is called a “Dead Hippy”), and there is a general absence of the sort of flim-flam that usually adheres to the high-concept eaterie.

It is a synthesis, a resolution of two opposing principles: it insists on the primitive deliciousness of a good, authentic, unmucked-around-with, diner-style burger, but at the same time it understands that there’s a kind of metrosexual sophistication about making a pantomime of one’s primitivism (the boy in the Clark Kent specs and the plaid shirt opposite you in Chez Whojamaflip understands this too).

After cocktails (excellent, if a shade archly named, and pointlessly elaborate in a way the burgers aren’t – it turns out that a “New Cross Negroni” is almost, but not quite, as good as a Negroni), I had a “Green Chili Cheeseburger”, my associate a “Mushroom Swiss”.

Meat Market | Restaurants in Covent Garden, London

The second offshoot in Yianni Papoutsis’s ever-expanding empire, this rough and ready burger bar has been drawing fans to the tatty Jubilee Market since 2012.

Meat Market is closer to Papoutsis’s street-food origins than its elaborately themed siblings Meat Liquor in Soho and Meat Mission in Hoxton.

The menu is tacked up in wonky plastic lettering, orders are taken at the counter and tables are separated from the market below by plastic sheeting.

The entrance is hidden up some back stairs; with its loyal Twitter following, the restaurant doesn’t need to capitalise on the tourist market.

It will be interesting to see how Meat Market retains its niche alongside Five Guys and Shake Shack, Covent Garden’s latest opinion-dividing American imports.