The Prince Arthur, London SW1: ‘Welcome to the bright new dawn of the turbo-bougie boozer’ – restaurant review | Grace Dent on restaurants

These could be the world’s best pintxo gildas, living their best lives in a back street near Victoria coach station

The Prince Arthur is a fancy new restaurant in Belgravia that’s rather hard to resist once you see the bones of what it has to offer. It has a Basque-born chef, Adam Iglesias, who has worked at Alameda near San Sebastián in Spain, as well as Brat, Barrafina and Sessions Arts Club in London. There you go: a plethora of foodie plus-points already.

Then there’s the fact that it’s in a recently lavishly restored pub that feels a bit like an AI interpretation of the Queen Vic in EastEnders: there’s a horseshoe bar, traditional wooden panelling, ales on tap, lots of standing room, a big TV screen for the sport and … wait! What? An iced seafood counter? Well, that’ll be for the lobsters, carabineros, sea urchins and other fishy things to eat in the elegant, white table-clothed dining room just past the bar’s standing area. Possibly you’ll eat those urchins, or perhaps a devilled egg, topped with the Prince Arthur’s in-house caviar, sourced via the London Caviar company. This place goes big on caviar, with 50g of Siberian baerii served with turbot-dripping potatoes and creme fraiche priced at £100.