What the experts recommend: new London openings

Temper 25 Broadwick Street, Soho W1 (020-3879 3834) “I’m not quite self-regarding enough to think people open restaurants with me in mind,” says Jay Rayner in The Observer. “But if they did, the restaurant would be Temper.” Chef Neil Rankin has been doing “grandiose things with whole animals and fire” for a while – and this is his shot at the big time, with “big London money, and bravado and punch”. The air is full of testosterone and wood smoke, the music is loud. At one point, I almost wanted to shout stop! “Stop it with your macho posturing, and your Paleo games. Stop pretending you’re all bloody cavemen.” But I was too taken with the theatre of the firepit – and with the unbelievably good food. Fabulous tacos to start. Heavenly cuts of prime pork, beef or goat on charred flatbreads. Intense sauces. And “beef fat potatoes” drenched in raclette cheese (a kind of “members-only club for saturated fats”). Temper won’t be for everyone: it is too “brash and boisterous” – and “ludicrous”. I loved it. Meal for two, with drinks, £100.

Breddos Tacos 82 Goswell Road, Clerkenwell EC1 (020-3535 8301) The duo behind Breddos, Nud Dudhia and Chris Whitney, were food-obsessed friends who jacked in their jobs and found “street food fame” selling beef short rib tacos at a market in east London, says Marina O’loughlin in The Guardian. Now they have opened a restaurant in Clerkenwell that serves a “chaotic fusion” of powerfully flavoured Mexican food with Asian touches – and that shows signs of being just as successful. Breddos “elevates street food to an art”. They make all the tacos in-house: “soaking, cooking, liming, washing (or nixtamalising) the corn and grinding it on a mill made from volcanic stone”. This might sound over the top – but no commercially-made taco will ever taste as good as these. And they are the “perfect vehicle for the dazzling toppings”. Each core ingredient – pig’s head cochinita pibil (slow-roasted marinated meat), say, or crisp-fried masa chicken – comes with a “backing choir of electrifying salsas and seasonings”. Take your pick from honey and pasilla chile, habanero sauce, shrimp chiltomate, x ni pek, and pea mole (“no, you look them up, I haven’t the word count”). This is “ferociously creative” cooking that will have your “taste buds howling”. About £10 a head, plus drinks and service.

London Shell Co. aboard the Prince Regent, Sheldon Square, Paddington Central, W2 (07818-666005) Housed in a cosy barge that chugs up and down the Regent’s Canal in west London while diners enjoy a chiefly fish-based set menu, this restaurant is “something special”, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph: friendly, quirky and as “eager to please as a puppy”. Inside, it is “cutely intimate”, and the food is, in the main, superb. To start, a snack of angel-hair fries – a “salty tangle of stringy crisps” – followed by “deliciously slurpy” Carlingford oysters. Next came an acidly sharp pickled herring, and a “dreamy” whipped goat’s curd with beetroot, sorrel and hazelnuts. Cod fillet was “velvetsmooth and soft as hot butter”, and came with braised cannellini beans, smoked pork and cavolo nero. Pudding was a “warm, comforting wodge of apple and pear crumble with Pomona cream”. In sum: “a treat”. Dinner £45, plus drinks.