Want to shake hands with your dinner? Beast is your kind of restaurant

Beast is next to Debenhams on Oxford Street and it is not conventionally beast-like; rather it is monetised and bespoke beastliness, which is not really beastliness at all. It is something worse.

The outside is Dead Animal Inc: glassy, corporate, bland. The reception has a 10ft bronze bear covered with swirls which look like paisley or some photogenic skin disease. A woman presses the button inside the lift for you, should you be too stupid or lazy to do it yourself. And downstairs, as the lift opens and you peer into the dark, you see a fridge full of hanging beef with labels flickering in a cold synthetic wind. They are next to tanks of king crabs and lobsters clambering on each other. It is the most chilling lift scene I have witnessed since Michael Caine slashed a woman’s throat in a lift in Dressed To Kill while playing a transsexual psychiatrist in huge spectacles. I press my hand to the glass of the tank because that is the movie cliché; the nearest crab, who is roughly 3ft wide, a livid red, and from Norway, waves a body part at me in a friendly manner. A king in a cage waiting for annihilation? Is this a metaphor for the customer?

The lobsters have more room than the crabs, even though they are cheaper (£50 per kilo) than the crabs (£75 per kilo). So here is an inverse class system for arthropods on death row in a restaurant that invites you to speculate on your philosophical attitude to killing a living creature before you collude in doing so. It is, in this sense, exactly like a Texan abortion clinic. The 16 remaining abortion clinics in Texas would steal Beast’s schtick, if only they knew about it.