Street food focus: Junkyard Market

Henry Norman visits Norwich’s new urban eating spot and dines at Greek Freaks...

To paraphrase Partridge, this month we pose the question: what do think of the gentrification of Norwich city centre? Sadly for Junkyard Market, the graffiti was probably already on the wall when its meeter and greeter finished their pre-dining debrief with ‘if you have any problems, don’t blame us’.

Beginning with the positive, the ‘interior’ itself is interesting enough. The market adopts a ski-style theme, with a couple of different tents to drink and dine in. Unfortunately, the traders themselves are hidden away with all the ordering being done pandemic-style via apps. I’m not a technophobe, but for me personally this is just a tad too far removed from the whole point of street food, and certainly the concept of a ‘market’.

More importantly, I would happily queue in order to get hot food, as it sadly transpires that the cold theme also extends to my giros, which can’t even muster up lukewarm. I am pretty reluctant to return anything, especially in a place so casual, but the fact is that it’s stone cold, so I embark on a game of hide and seek to find the Greek Freaks van and return it.

Then our drinks arrive… well, except my friend’s G&T. She eventually goes to track it down and discovers a load of staff standing behind the bar chatting. To their credit, they happily give her the drink without even checking her order. Finally, another companion’s veggie burger doesn’t arrive and he then takes his turn chasing that up.

If this sounds overly fussy, I’ll offer up some simple stats: the receipt told us that the veggie burger took 38 minutes to arrive (by which time everyone else had finished their food), and three out of four of our group had to leave the table at some point. To be fair, both the veggie and meat burgers were perfectly hot, though my replacement wrap (remember that)? was still only a slight improvement on the original.

In retrospect, it does take a weird kind of talent to get freezing cold food out immediately, then proceed to gradually produce progressively warmer dishes. Well, at least the beers were cold.

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