The act of opening a restaurant, being severely detrimental to both bank balance and mental health, should be done only sparingly over a lifetime. A fortnight ago, the team behind Medlar, a well-established, 15-year-old Chelsea fine dining spot, opened a sister restaurant, Cornus, in Belgravia. That seems to me an eminently sensible age gap, not least because the road to hospitality ruin is paved with overly keen expansion that leads to everything being spread far too thinly, be that the front of house or the praline cream.
At Cornus, however, there is already a real sense of judicious growth in just about every aspect of this particular rollout. First, the location: Eccleston Yards is a genteel, prettily kept courtyard of shops about seven minutes’ walk from Victoria station. Leave the traffic and the hubbub behind, and slip down an alleyway into a former power station that’s been neatly coiffed, cobbled and filled with a Hotpod Yoga studio, a cryotherapy treatment boutique and a bespoke iced biscuit emporium. If that all sounds rather frivolous and not at all rooted in “the real world”, then I’ll remind you that this is Belgravia and the residents here rarely sully themselves with common reality.
