Carnivores Will Love the New Meatliquor Restaurant in Duxton

Carnivores, rejoice – famed UK burger joint Meatliquor opens in Singapore. Female chats up founders Scott Collins and Yianni Papoutsis. 

“A series of happy accidents” is how Scott Collins (above right) and Yianni Papoutsis (above left) describe their Meatliquor journey, which began in 2008 with a 20-year-old van Papoutsis drove around and sold burgers from until he met Collins, who already had a thriving pub business at the time.

Tragedy struck soon after. That first Meatwagon had its chassis ripped up by thieves who broke into it, and the second one, which Collins and Papoutsis bought together in 2011, got stolen – and, with it, the equipment, the food, everything. “It was like losing a whole restaurant,” Papoutsis tells me.

“One of Yianni’s talents is to not insure things,” adds Collins wryly. “So we were up sh*t creek without a paddle.”

But things quickly looked up. Within a month, they'd found an abandoned shop space and set up pop-up restaurant Meateasy (the earnings from which funded the next Meatwagon), and went on from there (fast forward four years) to six brick-and-mortar restaurants across the UK, plus a radio station, Meattransmission, inspired by Miss Lily’s, a Jamaican restaurant in New York. Today, Collins and Papoutsis are among the most well-known F&B figures in the UK, and the Meatliquor chain has ranked among the top 100 restaurants in the UK's National Restaurant Awards for the last four years.

The Meatwagon saga and its happy ending – as illustrated by a schoolteacher, who used it to teach her students about the value of persistence. Now a page in the book The Meatliquor Chronicles (2014, Faber & Faber), opposite a scanned copy of the police's blase reaction to the theft of the second Meatwagon.

Vans, a pop-up, a radio station, a book – seems like a hodgepodge of things thrown together, but there's method in the madness. “Basically, what we’re trying to do at Meatliquor is negate everything we don’t like about bars and restaurants,” says Collins. And now they’re doing it here – thanks to local food-and-beverage company The Blind Group, the folks behind our favourites Operation Dagger and Oxwell & Co.

At Meatliquor Singapore, which officially launched two days ago, see first-hand how its founders' somewhat crazed, devil-may-care glamour extends to the food. The chain's UK bestseller does a good job of summing things up: the Dead Hippie burger (below) is Papoutsis’ version of what the Big Mac should have been – mustard-fried beef patties, lettuce, cheese, pickles, and minced white onions, plus something he calls “dead hippie sauce” (which they assure me contains no actual dead hippies). There's no tidy, prissy way to eat this – juices drip from the burger with every bite, and you need every square centimetre of both hands to hold it all together. You'll be a mess when you're done, but that's the Meatliquor experience.



There’s a story behind the name Dead Hippie, a convoluted tale that opens at Burning Man (the famed desert festival, where Papoutsis has served up burgers every year for over nine years) and involves a broken-down fridge, a very small frying pan, and an angry hippie on a verbal rampage. Don’t try to wrap your head around it – just enjoy the burger. Or down a couple of glasses of the House Grog Slushy, and you’ll no longer care.

Alongside food from the menus of Meatliquor’s UK restaurants, such as the Dead Hippie, the Buffalo Chicken Burger (Collins’s favourite) and onion rings bigger than your hand, you’ll find dishes Papoutsis has created especially for the Singapore outpost. One word: sambal. Papoutsis is obsessed with the local hot sauce, he tells me, and has concocted five different versions for the dishes at Meatliquor Singapore.

The Sambal Chicken Burger and the Sambal Wings, two of the four dishes that were created just for Meatliquor Singapore

Papoutsis' favourite of the lot: the sambal fries (below right), which comes covered in sambal and topped with a fried egg and crispy onions. (I’m guessing the inspiration was nasi lemak). For those who like it hot, there's also the Gunpowder Soft-shell Crab (below left), which Collins reveals was a natural result of a night out in Tiong Bahru fuelled by chilli crab and many drinks.

Like the food menu, the five-page drinks menu is a mixture of items imported from the UK menu and others made up for Meatliquor Singapore by Alby Barratt, who manages beverage operations for The Blind Group, and bartender Luke Whearty of Operation Dagger. My two favourites (and I’m not telling you how many I had): The House Grog Slushy, one of the bar’s UK items (limited to two per person, says the menu), and the Pina Colada, a Singapore special that was one of Whearty’s creations for Oxwell & Co.

The art on the walls is by English design studio Ilovedust, which is responsible for the provocative, in-your-face artwork at all Meatliquor joints.

The setting for all this messy eating and debauchery-inspiring tipple is, thankfully, not the tranquil, industrial-loft-lookalike, hipster-hideout style of interiors we’ve become accustomed to here. The place is dark and reminiscent of not-for-family karaoke bars, lighting is minimal, and graffiti-like art sweeps across the walls and ceilings. A neon sign behind the bar reads “Liquor” – great for anyone who’s had more than two House Grogs and needs reminding. “Singapore” in bigger, brighter neon runs across the length of the bar.

Emphasis on “SIN”, mind you.

Meatliquor Singapore is at 99 Duxton Road (6221-5343).



Like your food and drink with a dose of irreverence? Read about Nick Scorpion of Oxwell & Co, who served jail time because he couldn’t keep away from the kitchen