Even at 10 in the morning, before the barbecue pit at the centre of the Soho basement of his Temper restaurant gets properly hot, there is something of the firestarter about Neil Rankin. He has a charred kind of Edinburgh accent, and a fierce intensity of expression. Rankin has rendered cooking to its basic elements. He buys whole animals into his kitchen, butchers them on site, and holds every last scrap of them, brilliantly, to the flames. Meat hasn’t always been his thing: he used to be a fish cook. But he knew when he came here that he “wanted to play around with live fire techniques and develop that. And I knew that I liked fairly punchy flavours and didn’t want to hold back from that”. He grins. “But no, when I started I never quite imagined this,” he gestures around the cavernous underground space, which has the look of a subterranean speakeasy furnished by Dante Alighieri, stools circling the bar which circles the fire – and above it prime slices of cow and pig and goat – and low-lit confessional booths around the room’s edges. “I would have been quite happy to be head chef of a little 30-seater Soho basement.”
Rankin called his book about cooking meat Low and Slow, and there is something of that pace about his own career. It is perhaps no coincidence that his first – fast – food enterprise went up in smoke. Having graduated in acoustic science and worked as a sound engineer, he opened a sandwich bar in an industrial park outside Glasgow early in the millennium. And then a couple of others. And then one in Edinburgh, where he lived. And then three in London. And then it all went belly up. He was in his late 20s, by then, and, he suggests, although he just about “managed to get out without being skinned alive” was stuck for what to do next. “Me and my ex-wife were quite competitive about cooking. She was better than me,” he recalls. “I wanted to do the sandwich thing again but with more of a focus on food. I went back to culinary school – and thought I’d teach myself in a few kitchens. One result of that was that I became much more competitive than my ex-wife.”
Was he choosing specific kitchens to learn in?
“Fifty per cent was luck,” he says. When he was at culinary school he read a review of Nuno Mendes’s supper club on Hackney’s Kingsland Road and phoned him to ask if he needed a hand. Then when he left his French cooking school, he called a recruitment consultant with an unusual request: “I need a hard kitchen.” The consultant asked him what he meant. He said: “You know, 18-hour shifts, brilliant but difficult chef, that kind of thing.” The consultant sent him to Pennyhill Park Hotel where he worked under two-star Michelin chef Michael Wignall, which proved perfect. “I was 31 years old by this stage, so I figured I would learn more in long shifts than regular ones,” Rankin says. “I had to accelerate.”
He moved around, worked with Gary Rhodes, and noticed he was no longer getting shouted at. Rankin fully came into his own at Pitt Cue Co, the cultish corner cafe that began life as a trailer on the South Bank and ignited a barbecue obsession. “It was great, but you couldn’t make money,” he says. “We had 28 covers and 60 people queuing round the block. It’s tough to sustain a business based on having people wait for three hours to get fed.”
The solution, with his business partner Sam Lee, was to do Temper at scale, but preserve the excitement. Rankin remembers what it is like to fail, so when Temper opened on Bonfire Night 2016 it was with meticulous business planning and a degree of fear.
The confidence he had was based on a philosophy that insists that “we have to be able to buy the best meat possible and not overuse it” – and also that “people are generally pretty rubbish at cooking it”. Restaurants, he suggests, tend to focus on how to serve it quite quickly – Temper’s fire pit allows for time and space. Butchering their own carcasses lets Rankin take “nose to tail” a step further: “I don’t like the way we buy meat in restaurants and supermarkets,” he says. “The way we all buy certain cuts. I buy a great cow, and then work out how to sell the whole thing. People come in and say they want a sirloin and we may not have any. There are maybe six kilos of sirloin on a carcass of 600 kilos. Every single part of the cow is delicious to eat, it’s just knowing how to cook it. How do you make the shin delicious, the chuck, the rib cap? That is the basis of what we do here.”
If all that meat sounds like it is going against the food politics of our time, Rankin is prepared to take on vegan all-comers. Their arguments, he says, are too often based on American industrial intensive-farming methods.
“The problems arise from trying to grow things in places that aren’t suitable. Much of our land won’t support arable farming. Should a farmer whose farm has had cattle in the Isle of Mull for 400 years stop farming because of something that happens in America? These people sit there drinking coconut milk and goji berries flown half way around the world and telling me that I’m ruining the planet?” He smiles. “That pisses me off.”
Some days Temper has 600 diners. They go through about three-quarters of a cow a week. A new venture near the Bank of England, Temper City, serves mainly curries, in part because the sauces and stocks are a great way of using every bit of the lamb and goat.
But, as Rankin and Temper make very clear, “People don’t come out to dinner to be educated, they go out to have a good time.”
Temper is never about “Ooh, look what he can do with a sauce!” he suggests. But if you come here on a busy night – and there is deep hip hop or 80s music playing, the place is filled with smoke, people drinking shots and having a good time – and you don’t have a good time, then Neil Rankin would like to think it is more about you than it is about his restaurant.
19-25 Broadwick Street, London W1F 0DF; temperrestaurant.com
