"There's nowhere good to eat in Newington Green", nobody ever says. You'd think a part of town that already hosted Parilla, Jolene, Cadet and Primeur not to mention the dozens of top-quality ocakbasi and Eritrean/Ethiopian spots up and down Green Lanes, wouldn't need yet another notable spot, and yet here we are. I'm sorry if I sound like a stuck record, but as a Battersea resident yes of course I appreciate what Ploussard are doing, but I shouldn't have to rely on one (admittedly excellent) place to shoulder the weight of mid-budget fine dining for an entire square mile of south west London. Yes, OK Archway is good too, but that's pretty much Vauxhall. And Soif? That closed last year.
Anyway, you're not here to listen to yet another tiny-violin rant about how bad I have it in SW11, so back to N16. The Golden Tooth (not a particularly appetising name, I know) is run by the team behind the recently-closed Papi in Hackney, which I quite liked despite the cramped room and a broken booking system only giving us an hour and a half to wolf down our dinner. Up here in Newington Green the pace is much more relaxed (a bit too relaxed as it turns out, but more on that later), and this grand Victorian building populated by very capable and charming staff is altogether a much more sensible environment to enjoy the kind of food head chef Matthew Scott likes to make. A giant skylight in the restaurant section towards the back (there's still plenty of room for pubby activities at the front) bathes the area in soft light while the sun's out, but as you can probably tell from my increasingly murky photos, once the sun goes down the atmosphere becomes a little more clandestine.
I began with my usual control variable, a gin martini, which was great. Frozen glass, blisteringly cold liquid, and at a very reasonable £12. I've been criticised recently for a somewhat cavalier attitude to what counts as 'reasonable', and there's every chance my perspective as a Londoner who eats out as much as he can (which is increasingly less as costs continue to skyrocket) is a little less grounded than the national average. But in this New Normal, where it is not just accepted but a genuinely pleasant surprise when a meal out costs less than a return to Alicante, I think all of our perspectives need to shift a little bit. And anyway, £12 is very reasonable for a good martini.
House bread was OK - I'm automatically a bit suspicious of places that toast their bread, as if the raw version wouldn't be up to snuff - but the butter was lovely and light and soft, and the focaccia-style bread itself had a pleasant slight sweetness to it.
One of these dishes is grilled peaches with pata negra lardo, and one is hot and sour grilled cucumbers with whipped yoghurt. I do remember both were very nice, each using use of the charcoal grill to add smoke and flavour and texture to the main ingredients, and with some very clever (bordering on weird in the case of the peaches and lardo) flavour combinations used to good effect. But as you can see, they do have a strange compulsion to hide all of their lovely seasonal cooking under a layer of undressed green leaves, as if someone had snuck into the kitchen and emptied a bag of M&S salad over the plates just as they were heading out of the pass. So apologies if I can't tell you exactly what you're looking at - identifying them at this later stage is a bit of a challenge.
The same fate seems to have befallen these steamed clams, buried as they were under a washed-and-ready-to-eat layer of dry leaves, but, again, the clams themselves were plump and full of flavour even if I could have done with a bit more of the advertised chilli, or at least more of an even spread - some clams had none. I've not yet reached the stage of eccentrically carrying around a pot of dried chilli flakes to add to my dinner if I feel the spice levels are inadequate, as an ex-boss of mine used to do, but I do wish some places would be a bit more bold with the stuff (with certain notable exceptions of course).
Tuna with tomatoes and strawberries sounds like it might be slightly the wrong side of wacky, but everyone agreed this dish was one of the evening's highlights. They'd done that clever restaurant-y thing with the tomatoes where they'd been peeled and slow-cooked and steeped in something to turn them into little flavour bombs, and the sweetness of the strawberries actually worked rather well. Of course the star was still the tuna, big fatty slices of top quality fish.
Sheep's Ricotta dumplings with girolles were every bit as good as that sounds, draped in rich bechamel (I assume) and a thinner but no less-powerfully flavoured sauce made from (I think) whey. Perhaps £19 is a bit on the punchy side for 5 dumplings, cheese and mushroom hardly being premium ingredients, but they were done well.
And finally of the small dishes, an ex-dairy beef tartare shot through with bagna cauda (would you like some umami with your umami?) topped with a distressingly addictive mound of puffed beef tendons which I think I could have eaten until I was 90% tendon. The seasoning here was bordering on excessive but got away with it because the ingredients were clearly top-notch and it was all put together very well.
Of the mains, common consensus was that the hogget was the most impressive, a giant chargrilled chop with a healthy ribbon of fat, seasoned perfectly and with a fantastic texture that managed to both melt in the mouth but also carry enough chew to be interesting. It was a little on the cooler side than we would have liked, in common with the rest of the mains (there was a good 25-min gap before the larger plates arrived), but the quality of the ingredients still shone through.
Bacon is far less forgiving of temperature errors, and this smoked chop with parsley sauce really needed to be quite a bit hotter so that the fat wasn't quite as mealy. That said, as for the hogget the ingredients did a lot of the legwork and there's every chance any other day of the week they could have nailed the timing and produced something truly excellent.
I'm not sure what it is about John Dory, but I've never really understood why people consider it premium. To me it tastes soily and flat, and I've never had any example that makes me think it's worth the same as, say, turbot or Dover sole. So yes this was £54 worth of slightly disappointing fish, seasoned perfectly and not wrong in any major way, just a bit forgettable. £54 worth of forgettable.
Grouse was excellent, however, which is just as well as grouse is my favourite thing in the world and I've been known to hold very longstanding grudges against places that don't know how to treat it properly. Nicely aged but not too aggressively funky (I like aggressively funky but can appreciate I'm in the minority there), it came as lovely pink cuts of breast topped with a confit and breadcrumbed leg and alongside a wonderful confit potato thing which soaked up all the glossy grouse jus.
At this point I had run out of time and had to leave (did I mention that all the best restaurants are an hour and a half from my house?) so I left my friends to enjoy desserts (they were apparently quite nice, mint choc chip ice cream being a particular favourite) and split the bill after the savouries. With a couple of cocktails, a bottle of Marlborough Pinot Noir that seemed expensive at £80 until you find out it's £42 retail which is a markup almost unheard of for London restaurants, and a few extra bits and pieces (nice fat olives, salad, mash and some house fries that I think had been coated in powdered vinegar flavour), the bill came to £91.50pp. Which is, and I make no apologies for using this word again, pretty reasonable.
The Golden Tooth isn't the ultimate answer to gastropub dining in London, but it does hold its head amongst some quite good company, and there is a certain quiet level of ambition here that doesn't need to always be successful to be good value overall. I notice that the menu changes wildly from week to week - in fact hardly a single dish from one of my dining companion's previous visit a few weeks previously was available on this her return, which is absolutely to be applauded. And as I say, when it's good (the tuna, the hogget, the grouse) it's really good, and such relentless imagination and drive means there's a good chance there will be something worth your journey, no matter how long your journey is. Even if it's all the way from Battersea.
7/10
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