Slag food at its best. Emma McAlpine reviews the new opening from the #Meateasy team.
Such was my keenness to get to Meat Liquor that I arrived on Monday to find it closed. A cursory glance at the website had led me to instantly dismiss it as one of those trendy new fangled types that are all hype and no help. You know the ones: moody backgrounds with limited info apart from tiny words saying 'no reservations'. According to the Twitter buzz, Meat Liquor had been open for a week and that seemed like more than enough information to go on. Checking the website on my phone, I found limited but crucial details like the opening times: TUES – SAT, 12:00 - 02:00. Bugger. I returned on Tuesday.
So popular are owner Yianni Papoutsis' burgers that his meaty outfit has moved from a burger van to a pop-up in New Cross to a restaurant in Marylebone. I say restaurant but – located in the bowels of a brutalist car park – it's more like a dive bar-slaughterhouse hybrid; with animal murals, meat hook lights, loose cables and red neon everywhere. There are also amusing rules festooning the walls in black spidery letters, like 'No shirt-cocking' (shirt-cocking being a lexicon coined at the Burning Man festival in Nevada, describing a man naked from the waist down).
My friend and I arrive just after 6:30pm and get a table straight away, which seems nothing short of miraculous for a place with a cult following like this one (sure enough, by 7pm, there is a bottleneck of people in the doorway queuing to get in).
The menu is a joy in itself, with intriguing cocktails that beg to be sampled. A Full English martini is an intoxicating hit of Bombay gin and aromatic vermouth, served with a hot quail’s egg coated in breadcrumbs and crispy bacon bits. It takes a lot longer to finish than the 'house grog', a dangerously quaffable blend of rum and orangey punch served in a frosted tankard. There is also an amusingly no-nonsense wine list, my favourite selection being the Argentinian Malbec, containing the description: "A cracking wine for just necking and giving you red teeth."
Then there's the food. Strips of tangy pickles in bubbly batter jackets. Crunchy, fresh coleslaw. Towers of sweet, crispy onion rings. French fries that come like nachos, smothered in melted cheese, hot ground beef and jalapenos. Burgers that couldn't be further from the insurmountable pile of meat, lettuce, onion rings, tomato and bread that the likes of Gourmet Burger Kitchen serve up.
The beauty of a Meat Liquor burger is that it's not trying to reinvent the wheel. It knows it's a slut and is happy with what it is. Perfectly formed to fit in your hands, a glossy, sweet bap is stuffed with juicy patties of 100% beef chuck steak, chargrilled on the outside, pink in the middle; topped with squares of oozy processed cheese, pickles, onions, mustard and ketchup. Did that sound dirty? Now imagine eating it.
Each table gets a whole kitchen roll to mop up messy fingers and mouths and food is served on paper-lined trays to save time washing up. There's a slightly token section called 'Rabbit Food' with all of two offerings, perhaps a gesture for any vegetarians forced to accompany their disgusting meat-eating partners. Puddings are fat wedges of American-style 'pies', but if you still have room after the main feast, I applaud you.
As you'd expect for somewhere that's only been open a week, it's not quite perfection. We have to wait at least 40 minutes between appetisers and main courses and at times there are empty tables with a queue of people hankering to get in at the door. Our waitress tells us that only two 'burgerettes' from New Cross have transferred to Marylebone, hence why service tonight is a bit slow – many are still getting to know the ropes.
The move from pop-up to restaurant will no doubt take a bit of getting used to for the old staff. In New Cross, if you got a table in an hour you were lucky. You simply headed to the bar and drank so many cocktails the wait felt like minutes. In Marylebone, expectations are higher. Several suit-types are querying why their food hasn't arrived and a blonde stick insect is whinging to her boyfriend about getting through her lone portion of chips. Apart from a few disgruntled customers however, the place is alive with a happy, excited buzz. The clientele might have changed but the gratification hasn’t.
As we pay our bill, which comes to a very reasonable £30 a head, I spy more Burning Man references on the wall, the most obvious perhaps being the words 'Burning Man Festival'. I ask our waitress if owner Yianni is a former burner. "Oh yes he's been going for years, he loves it", is the answer. It doesn't surprise me; there's a lot of the festival’s hedonistic spirit in this place. It’s a little bit filthy and a LOT of fun, with a joyfully irreverent attitude emanating from its menu, decor and staff. Its gifts might not come free but Meat Liquor puts a lot of love and soul into its food and judging from what I've seen tonight, it's getting a lot back.
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