Temper

Where Soho's Appetite for Smoke Meets Structure

London's casual dining scene has, over the past decade, fractured into distinct camps: the stripped-back natural wine bistro, the chef-driven small-plates room, and the fire-forward meat counter. Temper, a restaurant on Broadwick Street in Soho, belongs firmly to the third category, and its consistency has kept it in the Opinionated About Dining Casual Europe rankings for three consecutive years, moving from Recommended in 2023 to a ranked position at #429 in 2024 and #463 in 2025. That slight positional drift within a competitive European casual list reflects a programme that has found its register and largely held it, rather than one chasing novelty each season.

Broadwick Street places Temper at the centre of a Soho block that absorbs serious foot traffic from media, fashion, and hospitality professionals who have short lunch windows and high tolerance thresholds for bold flavour. The Mexican-barbecue combination reads, on paper, as a concept with obvious collision points, but it maps onto a genuine culinary tradition: the open-fire cooking of northern Mexico, where large cuts are managed over wood and coal, shares structural logic with American low-and-slow barbecue even as the seasoning vocabulary and accompanying salsas pull in a different direction.

The Arc of the Meal

Understanding Temper as a dining experience means reading the meal as a sequence with its own internal logic, rather than a set of individually ordered dishes. The room is built around a central open fire rig, which means the kitchen is the dining room's visual anchor. This is a deliberate editorial statement about priorities: the cooking process is the spectacle, and the progression of what comes off that fire defines the pacing of a visit.

The early stages of a meal here tend to involve the lighter, higher-acid elements: preparations that prime the palate for what follows rather than front-loading richness. In the Mexican-barbecue idiom, this phase typically involves tortilla-based formats, salsas calibrated for brightness, and cuts that carry fat without overwhelming the beginning of the sequence. This is a category-wide convention that Temper follows: you begin with something that opens rather than closes the appetite.

The middle section is where the fire work becomes most legible. Larger cuts managed over live fire require timing judgement that distinguishes technically confident kitchens from those operating on autopilot. The smoke contribution, the resting protocol, and the slicing angle all affect the eating quality of fire-cooked meat in ways that don't apply to oven or pan cookery, and a kitchen that has been running the same format for several years develops a fluency with those variables that shows in the result. Chef David Lagonell leads the kitchen.

Closing phase of a meal in this format tends to be either a further protein course or a move toward sweetness, and the Mexican reference points give the kitchen access to a different set of closing-note ingredients than a standard British barbecue house would draw on. Caramel, chocolate, citrus, and spice all feature in Mexican dessert traditions, giving the sequence a more defined ending than the category sometimes manages.

Placing Temper in London's Dining Spectrum

London's restaurant universe in 2025 covers a wide price and formality range. At the upper end of the formal spectrum sit venues like CORE by Clare Smyth, Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, Sketch, The Lecture Room and Library, The Ledbury, and Dinner by Heston Blumenthal: multi-course, Michelin-weighted, and priced accordingly. Temper occupies a different tier entirely, one where the OAD Casual Europe list is the relevant critical framework rather than Michelin's guide, and where the value proposition is about quality of technique applied to a more accessible format.

That distinction matters for how you use the venue. Temper is not a destination meal in the way that a three-Michelin-star room is a destination meal. It is a high-quality, regularly repeatable option for Soho, the kind of address that functions well for a working lunch, a group dinner that doesn't require a three-month booking window, or a solo counter seat when the energy of live-fire cooking is what you want from an evening. Its,552 reviews reflects exactly this: a broad cross-section of diners returning consistently because the experience delivers reliably within its own terms.

For those planning a wider British dining trip, Temper sits at the casual end of an itinerary that might also include The Fat Duck in Bray, L'Enclume in Cartmel, Moor Hall in Aughton, Gidleigh Park in Chagford, Hand and Flowers in Marlow, or Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons in Great Milton. And if you're calibrating against international benchmarks, the structural ambition of fire-led kitchens in London compares interestingly to what dedicated technique-forward rooms like Le Bernardin in New York City or Atomix in New York City are doing with different cuisines and price points.

Practical Planning

Temper on Broadwick Street operates Monday 5 to 9 pm; Tuesday through Saturday noon to 10:15 pm; and Sunday noon to 6:15 pm. Sunday's earlier close at 5:45 pm is worth factoring into plans if you're building an evening around the meal.

What Regulars Order at Temper

Regulars at a fire-and-tortilla operation like Temper tend to sequence their orders around the kitchen's strengths rather than working through a menu linearly. In the Mexican-barbecue format, that means leaning into the larger, slower-cooked cuts rather than treating them as an afterthought to smaller plates: the quality differential between a properly rested fire-cooked meat and a quickly assembled taco is significant, and experienced visitors to this kind of kitchen know to weight their orders accordingly. The tortilla-based formats serve as a vehicle for the kitchen's salsa and condiment work, which in Mexican cooking carries as much flavour intention as the protein itself. Chef David Lagonell's consistent OAD recognition across 2023, 2024, and 2025 anchors the expectation that the kitchen's core preparations, whatever is coming off the fire on a given service, are the reason regulars return.