Langan’s Brasserie: Welcome to the restaurant where (almost) anything goes

Next week, a resurrection will take place. Across from Green Park, October 30 will see the famous neon sign of Langan’s Brasserie flicker on as the doors — once thought to be locked for good — open to guests.

The restaurant has been shut since last November, one of the many victims of the pandemic. Now it is to be reanimated by school friends and business partners, Graziano Arricale — formerly of Birley Clubs, who count celeb haunts Annabel’s and Harry’s Bar among their roster — and James Hitchen, who made his name as the CEO of one of Manchester’s most popular restaurant groups, East Coast Concepts.

This most storied of London restaurants, then, is in experienced hands. The pair have kept the bones of the old Langan’s — the grand brasserie-style food and showpiece dining room — but given it a facelift, expanding the offering. There will be a basement private dining room, a raw seafood bar, and an invitation-only upstairs bar, all of which has been overseen by interior designer Peter Mikic, with a profusion of Italian marble.

The question for the pair, though, is can they distil that same magic which saw Langan’s, which was co-founded by Michael Caine, become the restaurant of the Seventies and Eighties? The names were endless: Mick Jagger, Marlon Brando, Muhammad Ali. Joan Collins said it was “like a private club, where one could see many of one’s friends. I loved the food and the atmosphere, even if you did have to fight through the paparazzi on the front pavement”.

“Celebrities always loved to be photographed coming out of those revolving doors,” says one of those taking the pictures, Richard Young. “Everybody from Princess Grace, Elizabeth Taylor to Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro. They always went there because they were friends of Michael Caine.”

Arricale and Hitchen are hoping for more of the same when they open and while they won’t be drawn on names, will invite around 1,000 movers in film, music and the arts to become members of the upstairs bar. There will be no charge to join, but it will be a hand-picked set. “It is going to be a late-night space with a DJ and a select crowd — getting an invitation won’t be about money but about whether you get on with everyone else”, says Arricale. If you have a dozen celebrities in the upstairs bar, so the thinking goes, you are going to draw in the punters downstairs too.

Still, the story — and success — of Langan’s is intrinsically tied to the man who gave the place its name, restaurateur Peter Langan. Langan and Caine went into partnership in 1976, with Langan creating the restaurant in his own image. He was, Caine has said euphemistically, “a one-off”, and his antics were as much of a draw as the A-list crowd. He was also, however, irascible and unpredictable, in large part because he fuelled himself on a dozen bottles of champagne every day — or so he liked to boast.

With the Krug flowing (and sometimes being used to put out kitchen fires) Langan would crawl under the table and bite diners’ ankles: he was particularly partial to Janet Street-Porter’s lower leg, apparently. He once invited himself to Princess Margaret’s table while she was dining with her young lover Roddy Llewellyn, flinging his jacket onto the back of her chair and then scrambling onto the table while mumbling incoherently. She never returned. He once barred Rudolf Nureyev “for being himself”. He failed to recognise Brando, saying: “The only thing I knew about him was that he was even fatter than me.” And with Orson Welles, he kept things even simpler: “I think you’re a stupid fat f***.”

Unsurprisingly, his relationship with Caine suffered. Langan called the actor “a mediocrity with halitosis who has a council house mind”. Caine replied: “Peter stumbles around in a cloud of his own vomit and is a complete social embarrassment. You would have a more interesting conversation with a cabbage.”

Young, who knew Langan well, says that wasn’t the whole truth of it. “A lot of the time, everybody thought he was drunk, but he wasn’t always. It was all show business, entertainment. But then people expected it of him, so he sort of played up to the eccentricity.”

Whether he really did drink a dozen bottles a day, certainly by the time of his death he was not in good shape and his terrible end came in 1988, aged just 47, when he set his house on fire, distraught at the breakdown of his marriage.

He died six weeks afterwards, from burns and smoke inhalation.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, neither Arricale nor Hitchen have ambitions to play the part of Peter in their new venture. “Anyone behaving like Langan in today’s society wouldn’t last very long at all. Instead, we’ve tried to put lots of personalities all the way through the team — from the maitre d’ to the manager of the upstairs bar.

“We won’t be rolling on the floor swilling champagne, but we are keen to have a relaxed, vibrant atmosphere,” says Arricale.

He is also keen to harness elements of the theatrical. “It is not going to be a ‘three courses and a glass of wine’ place. Music and art is really important to us in creating a fun atmosphere. We’re also bringing back some of the table-side preparation.”

The food, then, will keep the old spirit. There will be some things at the new Langan’s which will be familiar to customers of old, and the menu retains many of the classics, including beef tartare prepared at the table, a prawn cocktail and a Caesar salad, alongside plenty of caviar and oysters.

Arricale is aware he has taken on quite a task but is sanguine about it.

“You definitely feel the pressure because there’s that weight of expectation. What we are always very conscious of is not to fall into the trap of nostalgia, or reminiscing too much. We’ve tried to capture the spirit but also make it modern,” he says.

Most of all, though, he adds, the new Langan’s will be fun. “It will be anything goes… within reason”. Though diners’ ankles will, they assure me, be quite safe.

Langan’s opens on October 30, Stratton Street, W1; langansbrasserie.com