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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.
You’ll have noticed that I have not called the Prince Arthur a gastropub, despite it clearly being gastronomical and being housed inside something resembling a pub. That’s because we need a new name for this type of highfalutin hospitality venture. With pubs across the UK closing at a rate of knots, the days of publicans rebranding as simply “one of them gastropubs” to survive are over. At one time, slinging a few £20 plates of beef cheek on polenta at customers and screwing a bottle of Aesop Resurrection hand soap to the toilet wall may have saved your soul, but not any more. Welcome to the bright new dawn of the turbo-bougie boozer.
Yes, the Prince Arthur has the framework of a pub, with Jeremy Clarkson’s Hawkstone beer on tap and pig’s ear bar snacks and posh scotch eggs with mustard. But it is essentially a very sophisticated, Basque-influenced restaurant that serves txangurro crab, Galician beef rib and whole turbot with glossy, pale pil pil sauce, with torrijas and Basque cheesecake for afters. Please keep in mind that this is just downstairs; the new upstairs dining room promises to be even fancier.
None of this, I must stress, is to my disliking. Ten minutes into lunch at this utterly lovable mega-posh pretend pub, and you will find yourself planning your return. From the first plate of gildas – skewered glossy olives, intricately folded anchovies and curls of green chilli pepper – I was smitten. These could be the world’s best pintxo gildas, living their best lives in a back street near Victoria coach station. Then two neat squares of those fish-dripping potatoes with sea urchin, tuna and caviar. The devilled egg is a work of art: a boiled egg standing upright on the plate, its yolk creamed and piped back into it, then topped with more caviar.
Suffice to say that by this point the bill was creeping up alarmingly, even though I could have balanced everything I’d eaten up to then on the back of a credit card. For mains, we shared that turbot, which was perfectly cooked and came with a world-class pil pil emulsification. A side of winter greens was disappointingly over-salted, though. Much better was a plate of wood-grilled pepper, a slimy, smoky mass of sweet, vivid, red loveliness.
The Prince Arthur is by no means cheap, but it’s worth it for a special occasion. The service is good, it’s in a beautiful room with a fascinating clientele of Belgravia locals who certainly don’t need to save the place for special occasions and, above all, the cooking is wonderful, especially if seafood is your thing.
And, of course, there’s that cheesecake, one of my favourite desserts ever, though I usually only ever eat it in summer, ideally in San Sebastián itself, where the temperature lends itself to a wander around the streets, pausing to eat wobbly, custardy, melting cheesecake out of a box. The Belgravia version was 99% there, and came with a thick winter berry sauce and enough caramelisation that I could almost feel the northern Spanish sun on my face.
There’s a lot to love about this restaurant, although, eventually, I fear, all surviving “pubs” will be like the Prince Arthur. House caviar on the menu, £25 a pop carabinero prawns on the grill, Sky Sports on the big screen, and anyone remotely normally waged standing outside in the cold, staring through the window like Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Match Girl, striking matches one by one while watching the world burn.
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The Prince Arthur 11 Pimlico Road, London SW1, 020-3098 6060. Open Tues-Sat, lunch noon-4pm, dinner 6-10pm; Sun noon-8pm. From about £70 a head for three courses, plus drinks and service
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The next episode of Grace’s Comfort Eating podcast is out on Tuesday 18 March – listen to it here
