Medlar

From the school of Chez Bruce, a (rare) Chelsea restaurant where the emphasis is on the food rather than the ambience - in the light of those priorities, it achieves its aims very well.

We all know restaurant groups have DNA - resemblances between the members of the 'family' explicable by their common origins. A pretty good example is the 'Nigel Platts-Martin group'.

If you live outside restaurant-land, you may never have heard of this former City solicitor, but he's just pulled off the remarkable double of being a major stakeholder not only in Chez Bruce (perennially London's Favourite Restaurant, as determined by Harden's reporters), but also in the restaurant newly-crowned as the one where you get London's best food, The Ledbury.

The subject of this review, Medlar is, so far as we know, the first break-away from the P-M empire. The chef Joe Mercer Nairne is ex-Chez Bruce, and the manager, David O'Connor, formerly held the same position at its Mayfair outpost, The Square.

On the evidence of Medlar, it seems that restaurant DNA can be acquired - unlike the real sort - simply by propinquity and experience. How else to explain that the new Chelsea restaurant feels, for all practical purposes, just as if Mr Platts-Martin had a share in it? (He definitely doesn't.)

Or, rather, it feels as if the early-days Mr Platts-Martin has a share in it, having that slightly 'never knowingly undersold' feeling Chez Bruce used to have, before it got quite famous, a little bit grand, and quite a lot more spacious and comfortable.

Ay, there's the rub. Medlar - as is quite natural for restaurateurs in their early independent days - has that slightly cramped, slightly cramped, slightly 'there-are-no-good-tables' feel Chez Bruce had in the early days.

That's the bad news. The good news is that all the other bits of the DNA have come too, so the menu is full of nice food with a gentle twist, so that you feel you want to eat all the way through it. When the dishes come, you're not disappointed by the results. And the service, by and large, manages to be there when you want it, and mercifully absent when you don't. And a very good wine list too.

In short, you might say, Medlar has many of the qualities you might associate with the legendary 'perfect neighbourhood restaurant'.

Which begs a very interesting question. When was the last time Chelsea had a real reputation as a good mid-market restaurant neighbourhood? If anything, the King's Road has a bit of a name as the-street-with-no-restaurants. It wasn't always so, of course. Not that we were there, you understand, but wasn't there quite a scene there in the '60s? That momentum carried on into the '80s (when we do sort of remember it).

By the '90s, however, the spotlight had begin to move 'Up West', and - with the odd exception in the environs of Sloane Square - not much has been heard from Chelsea ever since. The area may be full of people who are as rich as Croesus, nowadays, but they do seem rather to have stultified the restaurant scene.

But we digress. Will Medlar work? We hope it will, but - times having moved on since the '60s, and even the early days of Chez Bruce, the '90s - we must admit we didn't particularly enjoy eating food of this undoubted quality in surroundings we found slightly uncongenial.

On the other hand, though, many people felt just that when Chez Bruce opened, all those years ago. And look where it is now.