A victim of its own mythology: Langan’s Brasserie reviewed

Langan’s, a brasserie off Piccadilly with curling orange neon signage calling its name, is under new management after it fell into administration in 2020. It is a famous brasserie — London’s version of La Coupole — once owned by Michael Caine, a famous actor, and Peter Langan, a famous drunk, who would crawl across the floor and bite customers’ ankles and who once put out a kitchen fire with champagne. It opened in 1976 on the site of Le Coq d’Or and was treated by the diary columns as a person in itself, as famous as Annabel’s, Peppermint Park and the Ritz Hotel. Lucian Freud and David Hockney and Princess Margaret came here. Hockney designed the menu, a copy of which is in the National Portrait Gallery, and there are three portraits of Langan in the gallery’s collection, all posed differently, as if he is a drunken Mr Benn: one in front of a picture of Venice; one with tie flying, as if in a wind; one clutching a nude sculpture of a woman.