Food Miles: The Meat Wagon

I've been hearing about a legendary burger van for ages. The Meat Wagon is an old American ambulance that can be found in the car parks of pubs and bars in Peckham and New Cross doling out amazing burgers to thirsty meat-lovers. Now this institution has set up a kitchen at The Rye, a pub that sits at the north end of Peckham Rye. Someone even gets punched there in Muriel Spark's 1960 novel The Ballad of Peckham Rye.

'It's child-friendly until about eight,' a barman told my wife while she was making an afternoon recce, 'although it can get a bit rowdy on weekends.' On the strength of this recommendation, my wife and our two children and I met our friends Ash and George and their two-year-old daughter Nancy at 6.30pm in the pub garden. Freshly returned from Spain, Nancy was anxious to demonstrate some flamenco moves that she'd acquired on her Iberian sojourn. (I assume that's the case; she could just have easily picked them up from a Spandau Ballet video.) She and our son immediately found a dustbin tucked away neatly behind a wall and began to play with its contents. Then my son removed his shorts and pants and started to run around shouting. 'Is that OK?' I asked my wife. 'Nobody minds,' she said, just as he took up position next to two young men who were in a serious conversation and very definitely minded.

Once our children were under control, Ash and I nipped into the pub itself - a cool-looking place decorated in dark colours with touches of grandeur that give it a slight air of Gothic menace. At the hatch we ordered a selection of burgers, including something called a Dead Hippy (a double cheeseburger), and a load of fries, onion rings and homemade coleslaw, which had a great mustardy flavour. I devoured my Philly cheese steak; Ash's burger went down even quicker. The ladies ate far more politely, while my son got very excited about the fries and ketchup, with which he covered them and himself. We would have had seconds, but all evenings of this sort eventually end with a tantrum too serious to ignore and everything and everyone has to be hurriedly scooped up. I can't even remember whose tantrum it was on this occasion, although I imagine it was one of the children.