With MEATLiquor, a burger joint atypically unfriendly to kids and teens (see: Father’s Office), Papoutsis, partner Scott Collins and their backers defied the laws of location ruling the restaurant and cocktail biz, transforming a cursed corner space under a bleak car park on the back side of Debenhams Oxford Street into the hottest spot in town. Its red-neon sign, spelling MEAT as if viewed through shutter shades, has drawn the hip and hungry like flies to a fluorescent tube.

But it might very well be MEATMarket and not MEATLiquor that endures as a case study marvelled at by future generations of students in property development. Its burger balcony is perched over a sea of I♥LONDON tat at Jubilee Market. Whereas MEATLiquor flourishes as fairground dark ride MEATMarket attempts the same in Covent Garden’s house of horrors – London’s trinket hell.

You can safely enter Jubilee Market from its Tavistock Street entrance and climb a flight to MEATMarket without rubbing shoulders with spotty adolescents from Milwaukee. There’s little risk of their following you up the stairs either: The kid-unfriendly message is delivered to parents by off-colour personal ads displayed in illuminated decorative panels and, less subtly, with the word “DICKS” on the men’s toilet door. (In three visits I did not see even one of the hundreds of teenagers below climb up for a double burger and fries.) Likewise, with protective netting stretching out from the gallery edge you can guzzle all the boozy shakes you want without worry of toppling down onto the flea-market floor. Otherwise, could you imagine the tabloid headlines?

MAN FALLS FROM JUBILEE MARKET MEZZANINE, IMPALED BY CRYSTAL REPLICA BIG BEN

Rising above the riffraff and eating not caviar but sloppy burgers may have its charms. You sit as as an upper cruster in a privileged position, devouring the groundlings’ greasy grub. But is this why Papoutsis and company chose Jubilee Market as the location for what may be the prototype for a chain of MEATMarkets? I doubt  it. Irony is not his thing. It’s more likely low rent had something to do with the decision. Or Frank Sinatra: “If I can make it there I’ll make it anywhere!”

In the burger department, my area of focus, the MEATMarket menu features only doubles, all £7.50 (not cheap): The Double Bubble (a standard double cheeseburger), the Dead Hippie (a sensational riff on the McDonald’s Big Mac) and the Black Palace (piled with grilled onions – nice!). My guess is that the “Black” in Black Palace stands for ground black pepper, so indiscriminate is its use. The beef patties in the three doubles I tried ranged from wet pink to dry brown, tender to slightly rubbery. At their best the MEATMarket burgers are not just over-the-top drippy. They’re over-the-balcony drippy, with enough onion soup spilling from the Black Palace to fill a teacup.

If, in conclusion, I’m finding MEATMarket difficult to love it has less to do with absence of consistency than loss of irony –  mine  – in this, the Great British Age of Great American Junk Food.

MEATMarket’s vanilla milkshake requires the assistance of a Dyson DC25 to suck through a fat straw. That’s amusing, even at £3 for a 10-ounce (.3 litre) serving. The thick truth is it makes you feel like a kid. But my question for food snobs who praise the structure of this or that artisan gelato while debating the merits of Tahitian and Madagascan vanilla pods is this: how can you dig up words of affection for a small cup of sugared brain freeze that tastes of nothing?

MEATMarket, Jubilee Market, Tavistock Street, London WC2E 8BE

The Double Candy Bacon Flipper is the creation of Mother Flipper, a new street burger stall now operating on Saturdays at Brockley Market in south east London (see map). Split patties sweating grease from every pore are articulated with the sweet, pleasantly chewy crunch of the smokey streaky bacon Manuel Leal-Andrades (yes, Mother Flipper is a man) candies himself with brown sugar. The coarsely minced patties are housed with the basics – shredded lettuce, dill pickle, squirts of mustard, squiggles of ketchup – on a beautifully toasted and gently squashed brioche bun. Sensational.

To be clear, Mother Flipper isn’t at the top of the street burger tables just yet. Much as the two grillmen manage the preparation of each burger with care they can’t consistently pull off the liftoff to juicy medium rare. Taking burgers off the sizzling flat-top griddle after the cheese has melted to goop but before the comparatively thin patties have lost their interior lipstick pink colour is a game of seconds.

Over-salting is another worry. The two burgers I devoured at Mother Flipper (the second was the cheeseburger at right) were encrusted with twice the necessary quantity of Maldon sea salt flakes. My hope is that this is a temporary blip and not a reflection of London’s increasing tolerance and even preference for ferociously salty burgers. My fear is that indiscriminate salting by MEATliquor, Lucky Chip and now Mother Flipper are making more moderately seasoned burgers seem bland by comparison.

When salting a patty you must factor in the relative saltiness of the burger’s other elements. If you put anchovies in a salad or pasta you’d naturally use less salt. The same should be true if you outfit a burger with aggressively salty bacon, ketchup, processed cheese, dill pickles or all of the above.

Beyond any discussion of its burger components, Mother Flipper has a DIY sensibility I find appealing and promising. From the burger-steaming domes Leal-Andrades made from stainless steel mixing bowls and Champagne corks to the chapati skillet he heats over a Jamie Oliver mobile gas cooker to firm up and toast the split buns the vibe is analog and acoustic, much like The Meatwagon, a direct influence, in its early days.

When you reach the front of the queue and order at Mother Flipper they give you a number. Had I drawn 118, rather than 78, the countdown or, rather, the count up to my Double Candy Bacon Flipper could have been measuring my pulse rate, such was the anticipation. This is the street food experience, made to order. By the time my burger was ready I didn’t just want the Double Candy Bacon Flipper. I wanted the 78 Double Candy Bacon Flipper. In less than ten minutes Mother Flipper already had my number.