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 bacon patty is positioned directly atop the beef patty, essentially creating a double burger with an even distribution of bacon flavour and fat in every bite. You may lose much of the bacon’s crispness, which is a bad thing, but through the mingling of matching minces the beef and pork become inseparable, which is a very good thing –  at least until the greasy meats reach your stomach.

The patty-backed bacon burger was made famous by Hodad’s Burgers, which opened right off San Diego’s Bacon Street (I kid you not) in 1969. Hodad’s simmers strips of American-style bacon (British streaky rashers) until they shred easily, drains and chops the boiled bacon and shapes the bits into a thin patties. Meatwagon appears to follow the same practice. Both sides of the patties are fried on the griddle under the weight of a bacon press or, in the home version, a spatula and a strong hand. (Click here for detailed text version of recipe seen in video below for Hodad’s bacon cheeseburger).

Last night’s communication breakdown between Yianni and myself at The Boaters Inn in Kingston was less about our respective Englishes than the shading of our burger language. I understood “medium rare” to mean pink. He took my order of “medium rare” to mean he should cook it longer than he thought desirable.

The burger was great, I told him afterwards, “but could have been pinker and juicier”.

“What did you expect?” he replied, not believing I could be the burgermonday dude he’d heard about. “You ordered it medium rare!”

Rare, the default level at this pub-roving burger trailer and twitter phenomenon, is not so much red as very juicy. The Meatwagon’s medium-rare is merely juicy. The utter joy of very became obvious to me when I tried a second burger, this one ordered without mention of the dreaded M word. (When you catch up with The Meatwagon at one of its host pubs I’d suggest you not even wear a medium t-shirt for fear of a mixup.)

Yanni wants no part of the gourmet burger trade. Unlike Goodman, The Gun or  Hawksmoor he was not influenced by the New York School of Steak Burgers. His is a burger-joint burger, the speciality of American diners, drive-ins and lunch counters.

He flattens soft balls of mince by hand on the blistering griddle – no two Meatwagon burgers are exactly alike! – and only then does he season them, liberally, with salt and pepper. The burger sizzles on the griddle, encrusting both sides as the fatty juices leak from the deliberately crumbly periphery. Later Yanni squirts water on the griddle and places a metal dome over the burger to steam it. Quickly it is time to bun the burger and bed it with ketchup, mustard and dill pickle (American gherkin).

Yanni rotates an assortment of burger toppings and variations but doesn’t really get the meaning of a burger without cheese. “They all have cheese” he tells the woman taking orders and managing the queue. Guess it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t speak or think in Greek that much anymore: Once a cheezborger chap, always a cheezborger chap.

To find out where Yanni’s Meatwagon will be next, click here or follow him on twitter @themeatwagonuk.