Mercato Metropolitano, 42 Newington Causeway, London SE1 6DR. Food per head: £10-£20

London is eating itself out of house and home, literally. The pressure for affordable housing is intense. People with jobs in the capital need places in which to live that don’t leave them at the mercies of Southern Rail. Instead, suitable brownfield sites for new flats at affordable prices are being transformed into vast eateries which take the street out of street food. Ah well. At least we’ll never want for overloaded Korean-accented hamburgers piled with kimchi and ganjang called things like Seoul Food, because that’s hilarious.

One prime mover is London Union, which runs Street Feast, a series of self-contained sites around the capital housing a variety of street food operators alongside bars and seating. When the parent company first launched it announced a collection of financial backers drawn from the food world, including three of my so-called rivals from the restaurant reviewing business. Any attempt by me to suggest there might be a teensy-weensy conflict of interest in people who write about restaurants also investing in them, was met by outbreaks of acute eye-rolling. Oh, please! Get a life!

Some have attributed my comments to sour grapes because I didn’t get a sniff of the investment opportunity. This is entirely true. Isn’t my money as good as Giles bloody Coren’s? In truth I understand I was left out because I once offended one of the original founding partners. I shall wear that as a badge of pride.

Certainly it would conflict hugely with my own interests were I to review any of the Street Feasts. It would be horrible if I liked the experience and, as a result, found myself pimping the business investment of a rival newspaper’s restaurant critic. Instead, I went to Mercato Metropolitano, a similar kind of food concept, located in 45,000sqft of battered industrial space close to Elephant and Castle. It was opened over the summer by Italian businessman Andrea Rasca, who has identical ventures in Milan and Turin, and who loves a bit of sloganeering.

According to the infuriating website – it keeps trying to get you to sign up to their newsletter – they “build new jobs increase social and cultural values through the regeneration of local areas” and laugh in the face of punctuation. There’s lots of stuff about small being beautiful, and the need to support tiny food retailers because nobody else is doing that. Perhaps he’s been too busy to pop up the road to Borough Market.

To one side is a large Italian food store, which recalls the Mario Batali venture Eataly in New York. There are handsome displays of cheese and charcuterie, and a few ready meals. Across from there is the warehouse space proper, filled with communal tables in a renal-failure shade of yellow, edged by food stalls. Curiously, while other outfits like this big up the individual businesses, here they are blanded out by uniform, faux handwritten white-on-black signage. The effect is like the fake “farmers’ market” space Morrisons introduced into its stores. It all looks weirdly corporate. Other such operators are equally business-minded, charging entry fees, for example – they’re just better at disguising it.

Look a little closer here and you can find the individual branding. The so-called “Artisan French Bistro and Deli” belongs to Champagne and Fromage, which has an outpost over in Brixton Village. The ice creams come from Badiani of Florence and the pizzas from the famed Neopolitan company, Fresco. The latter, with its wood-fired oven, is clearly the star attraction and, at £6 for the margherita, it’s well priced.

The market for lovingly hand-shaped, wood-fire-baked pizzas – for the humble transformed into a bourgeois fetish object – has become crowded of late. It turns out you don’t have to be Neapolitan to make a good pizza. But maybe it helps. The dough is pleasingly chewy, the crust well charred. The Ripieno, a calzone-style fold enclosing tomato, mozzarella and salami, is one of the more expensive at £11. It’s a serious piece of work, all hot gusts of spiced air and smoky base. The only problem is the wait. On a quiet Sunday evening it takes 20 minutes to get a pizza. That’s fine in a sit-down restaurant, less so when you have to loiter in a queue, trying not to look bored.

A Vietnamese stand offers a chicken curry, full of depth and heat. It’s heavy on the potatoes but only costs a fiver; a salad of finely sliced roast beef, brimming with the floral hit of mint and coriander and fresh red chilli, comes at the same price.

From the Argentine Grill there’s a bread board piled with passable chips, surrounded by slices of slightly overcooked steak, a gnarly chorizo with the pleasing texture of something cleavered not pulsed, and pieces of sausage so garlicky your beloved will know what you had for dinner. It costs £10 and would be even better without the board.

Overall, there is the sense that there are gems waiting to be found if you can make the effort: over here a stand selling cones of deep-fried fish; over there, that place offering 19 different types of overloaded hamburger which all end up looking remarkably similar. From a stall selling myriad foccacias comes one of my favourites: £4 worth of thin, lightly salted, crisp-crusted bread stuffed with an ooze of stracchino cheese, served warm. It leaks its way across your fingers as you tear and fold. Nearby is the ice-cream stand with a luscious salted caramel spun through with shards of chocolate.

Drinks come with a side serving of words like “craft” and “artisan”. The young people’s music booms and people hunker down to eat, mostly with their fingers. If you can navigate the website, it’s clear there’s more to this venture: cooking lessons, urban growing projects, an onsite cinema, the works. It also offers a cheerful eating experience for the growing band of people with an interest in good food shamelessly priced out of too many London restaurants. It works. I just couldn’t help but wonder – if it was used for flats, how many people could actually live here and therefore cook dinner for themselves? I know, I know. I’m a total party pooper.

Jay’s news bites

■ Pop Brixton is an increasingly familiar style of retail and eating park formed out of shipping containers, with added values around community engagement
and training. The food offering is varied and generally reliable. Highlights include Koi Ramen, Baba G’s Bhangra Burger, Zoe’s Ghana Kitchen and Maria Sabina’s tacos. There’s communal seating and a pleasingly steamy vibe (popbrixton.org).

■ The urban community gardening project Grow Elephant, which occupies a once disused site near Elephant and Castle, also features the Tropics Café. As well as its own menu, it will soon be holding pop-up supper clubs (growelephant.org).

■ Following my review last week of the Euston Station outpost of Gino D’Acampo, My Restaurant comes news that the Manchester branch has won best Italian in the North West at the English Italian Awards. Is it that much better than the London branch? Or is the competition that much worse? Maybe the judges are nuts? Questions, questions…

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1