Everything at The Golden Tooth is done in the name of fun. It’s all smiley-faced croquettes, 80s music blasting, disco balls glistening, and menacing-looking langoustine heads protruding from stargazy pies. So the question is: style over substance, or both in equal abundance?
Puppeteering the good-time brigade are head chef Matthew Scott and hot-shot sommelier Charlie Carr, who first joined forces at Papi, a high-octane, well-loved London Fields restaurant. Consider The Golden Tooth an evolution of Papi, rather than a rebrand - that same out-of-the-box mentality remains, but this time under the guise of chairs with backrests, pristine white tablecloths, and a maître d’ welcome.
The kitchen’s opening gambit is a surprise amuse-bouche: two wedges of olive brine-soaked melon make for a refreshingly unconventional pairing and perhaps the first-ever ‘dirty melon’ on record. The team evidently has a gifted baker in its ranks too - the house-baked semolina bread is charred yet bouncy, served with Marmite-churned butter and topped with extra shards of salt, for good measure.
Fumes from the treasured Turkish grills of Green Lanes must be wafting into the kitchen, because our Ezme salad is up there with the very best. Plump Nutbourne tomatoes are meticulously peeled for a silky finish, soaking in piquant, just-spicy oil and dressed in shavings of creamy Dorstone cheese. Equally impressive are smoked pork jowl croquettes: golden-fried hockey pucks with confidently crisp shells that give way to an oozy centre of tender, mustardy cured pork cheek. Add to that a touch of tangy Oxford sauce and you’ve got a deeply satisfying spectrum of salty, sweet, and sour in one mouthful.
On a sweltering 30-plus degree day, an Iberico pork chop threatens to induce a sweaty food coma, but luckily, the team here is one step ahead. Across the menu, sauces have been tweaked at the last minute to favour a lighter, fresher flavour, making our hunky chop feel impossibly delicate. Scorched in a peri-peri rub, the plate is gently lifted with Mexican marigold leaves, providing citrusy anise notes that pair perfectly with our neighbouring plate of house fries, dunked in fiercely-herbaceous wild garlic mayo.
On the surface, The Golden Tooth is an all-singing, all-dancing affair, but beneath the theatrics are two people who clearly take their crafts seriously. The service is exceptional, the wine list is bursting with gluggable gems, and the kitchen keeps you on your toes. As for a fun time? That’s guaranteed.