temper Soho

Descend the stairs on Broadwick Street and the first thing you notice about Temper is the fire pit in the middle of the basement dining room, not tucked away in a back kitchen but front and centre, with whole joints of meat turning slowly over open flame. Neil Rankin, the chef behind it, built his reputation on live-fire cooking and Temper is that philosophy scaled into a full restaurant.

The core offer is British dry-aged beef, butchered on site, but the menu ranges wider than a straight steakhouse, pulling in Mexican-inflected tacos, grilled corn finished with lamb-fat béarnaise, and a red beef curry served alongside a smacked cucumber salad. The sauce list is worth exploring properly: chipotle sour cream, Korean barbecue, fermented chilli, each priced individually and each genuinely different rather than variations on the same base. That range across cuisines could easily feel scattered in a lesser kitchen, but the fire-focused technique running through every dish is what ties the menu together.

Sunday roast here has picked up a strong following, and the bottomless brunch option draws a rowdier weekend crowd than the weekday dinner service, which is worth knowing if you are after something quieter. Weekday lunch, by contrast, is a noticeably calmer version of the same room, useful for anyone wanting the cooking without the noise.

Service and food both get consistently good marks, with the open-fire spectacle adding a genuine sense of theatre that a lot of steak restaurants only fake with plating. The room does get warm, unsurprisingly given a working fire pit at its centre, and it can run loud once full, so it suits a group dinner better than a quiet date. Drinks lean towards bold cocktails and a decent beer selection, matching the general lack of subtlety the restaurant is otherwise happy to embrace.

Portions are generous and pricing, while not cheap, sits below the top-tier steakhouse bracket for what you actually get on the plate. It rewards booking ahead, particularly for the fire-pit-adjacent tables that give the best view of the cooking itself, and it remains one of the more genuinely distinctive dinners on offer in a part of Soho otherwise crowded with fairly similar restaurants.