Profile Pub Food: The back-door burger bar

The chalkboard propped up against the gate behind the pub is the first clue they're on the right track. A woman sticks her head into the bin-bag-strewn alley, scanning the dark for reassurance. But her feet stay firmly planted in the safety of the street light.

In just under three-and-a-half minutes there have been seven people, two puzzled phone calls, four queries of "is it up there?" and one yelp of "trust you to find this!"

Bewildered customers-to-be unfamiliar with this part of town stand in the street looking from printed directions or smart phone maps to the pub and back, unconvinced. A couple who have made it as far as the beer garden pause by the pile of cast-out furniture and carpet to turn to each other and giggle, unsure what kind of place they've arrived at.

But then Yianni Papoutsis, director of the Meatwagon, has always been hard to track down. Though service is in full swing, and the bar has been open just 40 minutes, inside the #Meateasy there are already 70 hungry mouths to feed and an hour's wait for food, at least.

From the flat roof behind the Goldsmiths Tavern in New Cross, South London, Yianni has a perfect vantage point during a stolen few moments for a cigarette to survey the confusion as potential customers try to find the way in. It's up the fire escape.

It would be accurate to say that the pub doesn't look much from the outside. Or as Scott Collins - operations consultant and shareholder at Capital Pub Company, which has just bought the site, and Yianni's partner in crime at the #Meateasy - puts it, "it's a shithole".

A faded banner for neon alcopops hangs limply from the pub's sign. Downstairs, adverts for Aldo's, the Italian restaurant it used to be, are scrawled across each window. Up close, the twinkling glow of the fruit machines reveals just four customers.

Money from nothing

But the Goldsmiths Tavern has become the unlikely home to a culinary experiment that is bringing street food to the fore, challenging the way big and small businesses work together, and raising questions on how vacant spaces in pubs across the UK can be turned into money-making opportunities.

Since early January up to 200 people a night have flocked here. It's a simple concept. The disused room above the pub is now an American dive bar serving Yianni's legendary burgers. At the #Meateasy there are no reservations, no card payments, no cutlery and lengthy queues that often mean a wait of up to two hours.

Food is served on paper plates, with kitchen roll on standby on every table for greasy fingers.

The previous evening it got so busy that waitresses, or burgerettes as Yianni calls them, had to abandon delivering food to the tables. Customers passed trays over their heads across the room instead. When Yianni, Scott and I sit down to talk, the #Meateasy has been open just six minutes and every table is full.

"We had no idea it was going to go off like it has," says Scott. "The best thing anyone has said to us yet was on Saturday night. It was peak time.

"This couple were here and they didn't look like they were having fun. There were 90 people with tickets by 6.30pm. This couple waited the longest, probably out of everyone, for about two-and-a-half hours. They ate and on the way out, they said 'that was amazing, it was worth the two-and-a-half hour drive'. They didn't even mention the wait."

Meat tweets

The cult following has come mainly from promotion on Twitter. Yianni, a set designer of 15 years for the English National Ballet, cashed in his savings in 2009 and bought a burger van as a hobby. A devotee of classic American burgers, he set out to create the best he'd ever tasted. Word got out and from all corners of the country they came to track down Yianni's Meatwagon in whatever industrial estate he had managed to park it in.

As locations and the times he was able to work varied so much, he promoted the van on Twitter. It became a game to find him. On cold, rainy nights it was not uncommon to have 40 or so customers huddled in the car park with a fire going, eating or waiting for the burgers. Food bloggers and critics from national newspapers lauded him. And then Scott came along.

"I'd heard about him through Twitter in about April," Scott says. "He was doing it out of an industrial estate in Peckham but tweeted that he was looking for a new site. I went and had one of his burgers, it was extraordinary.

"I invited him to park up at the Florence in Herne Hill, which was a bit of a gamble. I wasn't sure what impact it would have on our food trade, but it went off like a frog in a sock. I think that night a few hundred people came along. All through Twitter and his website."

The Meatwagon continued to enjoy success with pitches at a number of Capital-owned sites including the Boaters Inn in Kingston and the Victoria Inn in Peckham.

Yianni got a guaranteed pitch, something that as a mobile caterer is not easy to come across, and gave up his job to work the Meatwagon full-time. Capital got a horde of new customers. But then fate, or rather criminal scumbags, struck. The Meatwagon was stolen.

So on New Year's Eve the duo came up with a plan. Capital was finalising the purchase of the Goldsmith's Tavern. The company planned to gut the pub and refurbish it. But until contracts were exchanged in early February, there was a large room above it sitting empty.

Creativity with a credit card

"I took out my first ever credit card with a £2,000 limit and maxed it. We had a chance to be creative at very little cost," says Yianni, just about audible over the clamour of the room. Loudhailers squeak into action, summoning customers to order by the number on the raffle ticket they're given as they enter. It's now standing room only, and customers hover at the bar drinking cocktails while scanning the room for anyone who looks likely to up and leave.

"We are not a restaurant. It's not a fast food joint. We are a burger van. This is us in our winter clothing," says Yianni. "I want people to have the experience of a proper American dive bar. The whole thing has been an immense adventure. It's such a labour of love for so many people that the atmosphere reflects how much passion has gone into it and how much we're having a good time.

"It's the realisation of a dream I didn't have.

"The legislation makes it so tough to be a street trader at the moment. You can't operate without a licence or a designated pitch. But there's a shortage of pitches. There are so many creative chefs and operators now, it's a vibrant and exciting scene, but you just can't do anything."

Like him, most street traders specialise in one specific dish or food type. "Some are trained chefs," he says. "Just as many have never been in a professional kitchen in their life. They have a passion and dedication to one thing. You won't find that in a restaurant.

"That's where these people can really show the world what they can do, because if you want to open a restaurant, there is no such thing as a small business any more.

"The British economy is throttled by the price of property. So many people have so many good ideas, there's so much good energy there, but for whatever reason, be it lack of credit facilities or just plain old common sense, don't want to risk getting into insane amounts of debt before they have even taken a penny.

"We did this on the back of a fag-packet. This is a very good model, particularly in today's times, post-credit crunch where people can actually do something with their savings, which isn't just putting it in a bank and getting 0.1 per cent back or getting in thousands of pounds of debt."

With the #Meateasy, Yianni thinks he has hit upon a solution for showcasing the talents of street trader chefs. He wants other pubs to consider offering their disused spaces to traders near them.

Yianni is a member of eat.st, a grassroots foundation made up of and managed by street trad