Restoring selected files from tar backup

How can a selected directory with all of it’s contents be restored to a different directory than from which it was backed up? We do a full ‘tar’ backup of our UNIX system to tape every night. We want to restore a selected directory with it’s directories, files, and links to a temporary directory which is not at the original directory location. This is so a programmer can restore selected files which he deleted in error. We did this by copying the current directory on disk to a temporary location, using ‘tar’ with the ‘-C’ option to restore the directory to it’s original location. Then we moved the restored directory to another directory and then copied back the current directory. Is there a better way to do this?