Since it opened its doors in April, the new Chelsea eating-house Medlar has picked up reviews that are the gastronomic equivalent of high fives and punches on the arm. It's a welcome addition to that dog-leg section of the King's Road where World's End twists into Bibendum-land; its neighbours are a shop with a clock that goes backwards and a fine example of that dying species, the second-hand bookshop.
Its cooking pedigree is impeccable: the chef-patron is Joe Mercer Haines, an Old Etonian who until recently ran the kitchen at Chez Bruce, the Savoy of Wandsworth Common; he seems to have brought a few staffers with him from there and from Bruce's sister restaurants, Ledbury and The Square.
I'm not sure about the name, though. I first came across the word medlar in a novel by Candia McWilliam, who likes to use old-fashioned, Victorian constructions: "bletted medlars," in her book, turned out to mean "rotting apples." My spies in the fruit world tell me it's a kind of apple that's best when slightly decayed. And, had the owners consulted Wikipedia, they'd have found that, in literary circles, the medlar has been employed as a metaphor for premature age, and also, I regret, as a bawdy medieval term meaning "open-arsed."
Read more at http://www.independent.co.uk/
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