temper Covent Garden - Steak, Tacos & BBQ Restaurant
Steak house · Covent Garden ·
Pizza, 'not-pasta', and fun, fearless food in lively setting
Pizza, 'not-pasta', and fun, fearless food in lively setting
"For every Ed Balls cha-cha-cha-ing on Strictly Come Dancing, there’s a Paris Hilton DJ career. For every Dalai Lama on Twitter, there’s a Liam Payne on Instagram. Some of the most fun and most objectionable things in recent cultural memory have come from different worlds coming together. The same goes for food. Who would have thought parmesan sushi worked? Or that tofu fish doesn’t? And who would think that fish katsu would work on a pizza? The new Temper in Covent Garden does. photo credit: Karolina Wiercigroch This is the third restaurant from the people who brought us the cheeseburger taco (very good), korean haggis (very good), and grilled corn with popcorn (not so good). Whereas meat is the focus in Soho, and curry in the City, Temper Covent Garden is all about pizza and pasta. Don’t expect a margherita and a spaghetti carbonara though. We know these guys like to switch things up a bit and it’s no different here. Pizzas come super thin, a ‘Massachusetts round’, or super fat, a ‘Detroit square’. As with dishes in the other Temper restaurants, some things work here and some things don’t. Of the thicker style pizzas, the cheeseburger and kimchi toppings are weird and wonderful, and the perfect meeting of two worlds. The cheeseburger and the pizza are both comfort food royalty, and their matrimony is far more fulfilling than anything you’d read about in the Daily Mail. Not every pizza mash-up reaches these heights though. A thin-crust clam pizza is overpowered by cheese, while a katsu pollock topping tastes more confused than anything else. It’s hit and miss, and that’s the risk you take when you put unexpected things together. The same goes for the ‘pasta/not pasta’ and other bits here. The idea is that every pasta dish tastes and feels as if it was made from pasta without there actually being any, like razor clams with ’nduja or the lardo carbonara. Both have all the tastes and textures you’d expect from a pasta dish without there being any of the actual stuff. It’s there but it isn’t. It’s like your Uber on the corner of the street. This works superbly at times, but not everything hits the mark. Beef cannelloni is, like the clam pizza, overpowered by cheese, while garlic bread with ’nduja is essentially cheese on toast. When things don’t work here it’s either down to two things: too weird or too cheesy. But when they do, it’s both delicious and fun. Fun is the operative word when talking about this new Temper. It’s big and open with a large kitchen-grill in the middle (as per their other set-ups), and, mainly thanks to the food itself, it feels like a bit of a party restaurant. This is a place where you come en masse, drink some vermouth or spritz on tap, get started with some ragu and crunchy polenta, before rolling the dice with a few pastas and pizzas. It’s fearless, but more importantly, it’s fun. That’s what you want most from someone or something trying to do something a bit different. RESERVE A TABLE WITH RESERVE A TABLE Food Rundown Goat Ragu With Crunch Polenta Beef ragus feel like the pulled pork of the pasta world these days. This goat ragu is very different. It’s rich and moreish, and very nice with the polenta bites. Cheesy Garlic Bread Who doesn’t like a slab or cheesy bread the size of your bed? It is what it is, we couldn’t really taste ’nduja though. photo credit: Karolina Wiercigroch Burnt Fruit With Chicory A bit like when you order a large drink from somewhere in America and you’re all like “oh wow that is big”. This is burnt. Too burnt. Lardo Carbonara The noodles are actually strips of lardo. Yes, it’s as filthy as it sounds. And, yes: it’s amazing. photo credit: Karolina Wiercigroch Razor Clams With Nduja Close your eyes and you think you’re eating a buttery, spicy clam pasta. But, wait for it. The clams are the pasta. David Blaine eat your heart out. photo credit: Karolina Wiercigroch Cheeseburger Pizza Officially the ultimate hangover/comfort food. photo credit: Karolina Wiercigroch K-Whole Pizza This has a kimchi base. Traditionalists will say this is not a pizza. Traditionalists are wrong. Katsu Pollock Pizza This is like when a stranger tries to talk to you when you’ve got your headphones on: weird and not at all welcome. White Clam Pizza Imagine sitting down to watch a film in the cinema and someone sits beside you who proceeds to cough throughout the entire thing. The cheese is the cougher on this pizza. Unignorable. photo credit: Karolina Wiercigroch Nutella Cookie And Ice Cream This is the childhood dessert of your dreams. photo credit: Karolina Wiercigroch" - Jake Missing
"You know that friend who comes running at you, screaming ‘It’s Fri-YAY bitch!’, before embracing you in a bear hug that’ll leave your ribs bruised for a week? Temper Covent Garden is that friend in restaurant form. It’s loud, proud, and shameless fun. It’s a big, open space with a large kitchen/grill in the middle, which is exactly the kind of environment where you can have some loud and lairy fun." - heidi lauth beasley, eileen twum
"What It Is: A third restaurant from The Temper people focussed on fake pasta and amazing pizza Perfect For: Literally Everyone, Fun Date Night, Girls And Boys Night Out, This new spot from the crew behind Temper City and Temper Soho is a little bit the same, but also quite a bit different from those other outposts. It’s the same in that it’s got a similar air of excitement about it, like a party could break out at any moment. But it’s different in that it specialises in pizzas rather than the meats on offer at those other restaurants. In typically iconoclastic fashion, the pizzas come with weird toppings, some of which were wonderful, like the cheeseburger and kimchi Detroit-style pies. Elsewhere on the menu, something called ‘not-pasta’ features batshit inventions like lardo carbonara, where the lardo stands in for pasta. It’s every bit as filthy as it sounds. The Verdict: We like this place a lot. It’s fun, it gives zero f*cks, and serves cool, slightly ridiculous food that we’ve never had anywhere else. We’ve added it to our Hit List." - sam collins, oliver feldman, heidi lauth beasley, jake missing, eileen twum
"Chef-restaurateur Neil Rankin — who runs restaurants in Soho, the City and Covent Garden — has been serving a much‑Instagrammed cheeseburger pizza that closely resembles a recently launched Domino’s version: a tomato-and-mozzarella base topped with ground beef, sliced gherkins, onion and burger sauce. Rankin suggested it’s “pretty much a dead cert” that Domino’s took inspiration from his dish but was conciliatory, noting similar burger‑pizza hybrids have existed in the U.S. and that culinary ideas are frequently borrowed and reinvented. He says he finds the imitation flattering rather than annoying, though he is frustrated by the disproportionate press and reach that multinational chains receive compared with independent innovators. The episode highlights how food trends move from transgressive to mainstream rapidly, with Instagram amplifying small‑scale creativity that big companies can scale to far more diners." - Emma Hughes
"The Covent Garden outpost of Neil Rankin’s Temper group has recently shifted its offering away from Massachusetts-style pizzas toward meat-focused flatbreads, reflecting a broader move within the group toward meat-led menus after poor lunch trade prompted similar changes elsewhere." - James Hansen
