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. ‘High living’, the gallery notes call Langan. It’s a euphemism for madness, and he died in 1988 at 47 after setting fire to his own house.

This is his other house. And, like La Coupole, which calls itself ‘mythical’ on its website — is the food then mythical too? — Langan’s is still self-involved, existing on the fumes of the past. It still has plates with Langan’s name on; if you seek his memorial, look down. Around these curios is a vast and handsome room on Stratton Street, with mad art, pale walls, marble floors and Murano chandeliers. It is, on a Friday evening, filled with shouting people getting very drunk. I don’t mind people getting very drunk — why would I? — but I believe, at these prices (Hockney’s menu has chocolate mousse for £1.20