Temper, London: restaurant review

Smoke gets in your eyes at Temper, but it’s the sumptuous rendered meat that will make you weep

Temper, 25 Broadwick Street, London W1F 0DF (020 3879 3834). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £100

After dinner at Temper I slept with the smell of dinner in my hair. I stank of wood smoke, rendered animal and testosterone. That’s what restaurants with big, manly smoke pits are like. They leave their mark on your nostrils and your hair and your psyche. I was derailed by the noise and the flames and the beards. Oh, those beards!

Who thought this was a good idea? It’s a rhetorical question. He’s a chef called Neil Rankin, and he’s been doing grandiose things with whole animals and fire for a while now, at both Smokehouse and Bad Egg. He’s remained something of a cult, but this is his shot at the big time in London’s Soho, with big London money, and bravado and punch. There is a menu, but they could just replace it with a massive sign stamped with the word MEAT!, alongside one of those comedy boxing gloves on an extending arm which keeps punching you in the face until you surrender.

You sit on a bar stool, fixed so close to the counter that if you’re over 5ft 9in your knees will be forced back into your body by the lumbar support, and watch sweaty men (and, to be fair, one woman) do things with fire, protein and fat. Lots of fat. They bring in whole carcasses here, butcher them on site, then cook the various cuts over fire. You pay by the 100g for a mixed plate of whatever is ready. The listing for beef, apparently a British White from Essex, says: “Mix of smoked rib meat, neck and shin, leg shawarma & grilled prime cuts.”

And that’s what you get. A plate of stuff from something that once walked and ate grass. Sirloin with a bit of fat. Leg with a bit of fat. Fat with a bit of fat. You try telling one muscle from the other. Only the goat isn’t fatty because they smoke that for nine hours somewhere in a back kitchen. Meat goes on the fire and comes off the fire, its skin the colour of brass coins. Chefs cut away at it to lasciviously reveal the Ann Summers pinkness within. They furrow their brows. Here, a good furrowed brow is a minimum qualifying standard.

There’s other stuff. There’s corn kernels in “lamb fat butter” and “beef fat potatoes” drenched with raclette cheese, which is like a members-only club for saturated fats. To pass the time until the meat comes there are filled tacos, and sauces including something called MSG Ketchup, which sounds like a new model of Volkswagen. And there’s loud music, and meat and fat and smoke, and fat and meat. And smoke. Did I mention the smoke?

It’s enough to make me want to grab a map of London and scrawl “Stop it!” across the sheet in black marker pen. Stop it with your macho posturing, and your Paleo games. Stop pretending you’re all bloody cavemen. It’s 2016 for God’s sake, the age of Uber and Tinder and Miele and Smeg. Are we all so insecure that we have to set fire to trees to prove we’ve got testicles?

And I would do this, really I would, were it not for one thing. Temper is brilliant. Temper is one of the most exciting restaurants to open in London this year. I’m not quite self-regarding enough to think people open restaurants with me in mind. But if they did, the restaurant would be Temper. I love the fact that you can smell the wood smoke and the rendering meat from the door. I love the way that smell stays in your hair. I adore the theatre of the fire pit, the glowing embers and the flash and dance of sparks, and the way they pay so much attention to the roasting joints.

Of course you can ask them for lean cuts if that’s what you want. They’ll do it for you. But why would you? These are pieces of prime animal and they are both muscle and fat and you need the whole story. I had never met Rankin before the night I descended into his basement and sat down on one of his bar stools. But it was as if he understood what would make me happy. (And don’t worry about the tightness of those bar stools; just turn them 180 degrees so you are straddling the back like in that famous Christine Keeler picture, only with clothes on. For us bigger men, it works.) Of course, you could sit at a table and stare at each other but again, why would you?

To start there are those tacos of ground, gravelly corn, loaded with blow-torched mackerel and shavings of fishy, pungent bottarga, and vinegary green sauce, or raw cubes of beef, glazed with sauces of fermented chilli and soy. These are the wake up. Then there are those meats, starting at £5.50 per 100g for the pork, all leg and shoulder and belly with fat like ivory, to £8 per 100g for the beef and topping out at £9.50 for the goat. All come on charred flatbreads, made on site.

There are sauces: that intense ketchup, a salsa of fire-blackened peppers or one of fresh tomatoes. For texture there are little bowls of things like crushed pork scratchings or deep-fried onions or peanut and lime zest. And maybe you won’t ever get to those beef fat potatoes with the slab of stinky raclette but it’s good to know they are there for emergencies. You can have spiced wilted greens if you must.

Witness: a review of two halves, and consciously so for here’s the thing. Sometimes I write positively about a place and people disagree with me. The explanation for the dispute is simple. They are wrong. They have no taste or judgment. Temper is not like that. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a restaurant I so loved, while also recognising that others would have completely valid reasons for hating it. Temper is brash and boisterous and macho and ludicrous – and utterly brilliant. But not everyone has my taste for animal and smoke and theatre and brilliance. You’re adults. Make your own bloody minds up.

One thing though. For dessert they serve a luscious dish of soft-centred chocolate cookie, still hot in its pan, as well as a kouign amann, a kind of croissant-style laminated pastry drenched with butterscotch sauce. If you don’t like those two, if they don’t do it for you, there is only one explanation. On that you really are completely wrong.

Jay’s news bites

If you fancy more wood-smoke action visit John Doe in London’s Westbourne Grove area, though their approach is a little more subtle than that at Temper. Go for smoked venison tartar, ash-roasted leeks with a caper and tarragon dressing and salt marsh lamb (johndoerestaurants.com).

Streetsmart, which raises funds to tackle the problem of homelessness, is once more with us. Diners at 500+ restaurants will be invited to add a donation of £1 to their bill. Last year the campaign raised over £500,000, which went to 30 homelessness charities (streetsmart.org.uk

In Brighton, sushi restaurant Moshimo has secured planning permission for a new space perched on a column 150ft above Bartholomew Square. Meanwhile planning permission has been granted in London for a building, already nicknamed the Trellis, that will house what’s believed will be the capital’s highest restaurant. I may once have advised people never to visit a restaurant that sells itself on the view.

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

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