Medlar

I've just spent a week eating my way north through Sweden, from Malmö to the land of the midnight sun. The current frenzy for New Nordic cuisine is sending Scandinavian chefs crazier than reindeer on magic mushrooms, with foraging and the 'local and seasonal' mantra taken so seriously there that some meals resemble roadkill and verge clippings. Songbird heads, in case you've ever wondered, are best eaten without the beaks on. Lichens are quite palatable if deep-fried. Freshly picked oilseed rape flowers are the garnish du jour.

While such avant-garde eating is all terribly exciting, it's also a relief to sit down to a menu where the waiters don't bring a saw to your table for you to get at the bone marrow. And Medlar is precisely the sort of restaurant that, since it uses local and seasonal ingredients, makes you feel very grateful that London is closer to the Mediterranean than to the Arctic Circle.

The entire menu sounds delectable, and every dish we tried exceeded our expectations. A chilled soup of courgettes was simple and summery, subtly flavoured with chervil and very prettily decorated with tiny pansy flowers, like wildflowers in a meadow, plus fresh oysters. More robust flavours are introduced with the red wine sauce, lardons and sautéed duck heart accompanying a fried duck egg.

A more pronounced French influence is seen in dishes such as grilled black bream served in bowl of artichoke barigoule. This Provençal vegetable stew had been pimped up with little blobs of rouille and mussels prised from their shells. Wood pigeon showed chef-patron Joe Mercer Nairne's considerable skill with meat cookery: tender but not bloody, served with tiny potato cakes and delicately flavoured with new-season garlic.

Dish after dish wowed us with its balance of flavours and sublety of expression, such as a dessert of buttermilk panna cotta topped with English strawberries and crumbed pistachios - delicate and restrained, and all the better for it. Much the same can be said of the service. Many of the staff appear to have previously worked at Nigel Platts-Martin restaurants (The Square, Chez Bruce, Ledbury) which has translated into the slightly formal, but mostly smooth service here. The interior is also sleekly modern, more Mayfair than World's End.

Be warned that Medlar has been open since the spring, and that word has most definitely got around: even my next-door neighbour stopped me in the street to tell me about it. It also took me weeks to find a suitable empty table. But the appeal is obvious: this is five-star food at the wrong end of Chelsea, where the pickings are normally as thin as moss on the taiga. Discerning locals who want to eat local, and seasonal, should treasure it. And be grateful that their World's End is on the King's Road, not a few degrees north of Ostersund.