Temper Covent Garden review: James Hansen plays flavour Whac-A-Mole

Blue: the new restaurant doesn't hum like its older sibling
James Hansen22 June 2018

Ambience: 2.5/5

Food: 2/5

Arriving at Temper Soho, you escape the cobblestone bedlam of Broadwick Street for an elegant bar: speckled countertop, smart stools.

You smell embers. Fat. You descend. A pit of green leather, carcasses smoking over sordid fires — salt, grease, acid, heat and careless gluttony piling aged beef and angry sauces on to vegetables and bread, blackened and supplicant. Delicious ruckus.

Where Temper Soho is green and smoky and thrumming, Temper Covent Garden is blue and a room. It’s not helped by the new-dev location — insulated from more cobblestone bedlam, but soulless rather than stirring. A brushed-metal bar skirts the signature open kitchen. There are cocktail taps, a robata grill, a wood-fired oven. Very London, very now. Two tapped drinks in hand — one excellent Temper vermouth from Cocchi, one Aperol sadly unspritzed — and we were hungry. The menu played a 1970s arcade reboot: Google Trends Whac-A-Mole. Nduja; kimchi; lardo; unorthodox charcuterie; katsuobushi; katsu; ssamjang; XO; harissa; harrisa (sic). It promised thrilling nuance and nuclear collision. It delivered neither.

Snappy, funky XO mayo couldn’t deliver a kiss or hug of life to school dinner slop

Small dishes appeared with worrying speed. Lardo carbonara, cured fat replacing pasta, was sultry and unapologetic. And then came prawn and sesame cannoli, which should grovel to Sicily and dim sum alike: it collapsed into abject mush with a weary sigh. Snappy, funky XO mayo couldn’t deliver a kiss or hug of life to school dinner slop. Cabrito goat ragu was more name drop than flavour bomb. It’s surprising: Neil Rankin and business partner Sam Lee didn’t open three Temper restaurants by being incompetent. And at Pitt Cue and — most gallingly — Temper Soho, Rankin fissioned flavours with the best of London’s most thrillingly irreverent restaurants such as Black Axe Mangal and The Laughing Heart. Exciting food that you want to eat.

Continually opening open-kitchen restaurants seems as honest as it is theatrical: you see everything. Here, one sees pizzas half-cooked and abandoned, a stack of red tops waiting for their second firing is an appropriately tabloid hack. Par-baking ensures a cracker-shatter crust on the ‘bar pizza’ — a very good thing — but it also means timing has to be exact. We shared two, but we could have split one deep-dish Detroit behemoth. On the New England clam bake, clams were briny little atonements for an annihilation of Tabasco-ish hot sauce. Good cheese. Crab okonomiyaki referenced a traditional Japanese pancake served Hiroshima style with garnishes on top: it worked visually, but sad fridge-cold crab was ruinous. Katsuobushi was more 2B pencil shavings than it was bonito. Crunchy nut cannoli proffered over-honeyed cream and claggy cornflakes.

There were flickers of life: a Nutella cookie with a smutty, bought-in peanut ice-cream was pleasure uncoupled from ‘concept’. A salad of burnt orange, pineapple and husky chicory zapped with Sichuan pepper was a spritzy revelation. Dedicating that robata to fresh produce was genuinely exciting. And the vermouth was delicious, too.

Restaurants have off nights, but what lingers here is a feeling that everything is executed to spec, spiting a menu that reads so much better than it eats. There’s no heart, no vigour, no joy: people are eating and drinking, the trend bingo a masterful mugging-off. Temper Covent Garden is David Chang lobotomised: not sending diners to hell in a handcart, but to purgatory on a bandwagon.

Not impressed: James Hansen

Temper Covent Garden

2 Temper Vermouth £8

1 House Aperol Spritz £6

1 House Negroni £8

1 Prawn cannoli £7.50

1 Lardo carbonara £5.50

1 Goat ragu polenta £7

1 Burnt fruit and chicory salad £5.50

1 Crab pizza £16.50

1 White clam pizza £15

1 Deep dish brigadeiro cookie £6

1 Crunchy nut cannoli £4

Total £89

5 Mercer Walk, Mercers’ Yard, WC2 (020 3004 6669; temperrestaurant.com)

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in