Half a century of mischief: Langan’s turns 50
It was Mayfair’s original den of fun when it opened in 1976. But can Langan’s bring some mischief back to London dining, half a century hence?
- Words by: Joseph Bullmore
- Photography: Getty Images
There is a part of me which thinks that every restaurant should really be a version of that place in Goodfellas, the Copacabana, where Henry takes Karen on their first date, and where the camera swoops to follow them through the bustling back corridors, the hubbub of the kitchen, the crush of the crowd, and out into the rarefied atmosphere at the front of the stage, with the small table and the little lamp and the perfect view procured just for them — these friends of ours, these wise guys, these good fellas. In London, only one restaurant can really claim to furnish such daydreams, to play such a role. Langan’s feels like a place from both a movie and a different era, probably because it is. That neon red sign. That low lit reception. It was started by a movie star, Michael Caine, in October 1976, making it 50 years old this week, or roughly 750 in restaurant years. Langan’s, famous for the art on its walls, is now something of an old master itself.
Langan’s drew a crowd from the worlds of music, film and fashion.
Caine started it with Peter Langan, an entrepreneur then running something called Odin’s, when he met the actor, who loved its French brasserie food. Odin’s reminded Caine, he said, of La Coupole in Paris, then the last word in proper bistrots, and so, with the help of chef Richard Shepherd, and a lovely, light-filled site next to Green Park station, the pair set about making “the most fabulous restaurant in London,” Caine said. “It was the combination of those three people that really put London dining on the map internationally,” Dylan Jones told BBC radio recently, talking about his new book Table Hopping.
French brasserie cooking was at the heart of Langan’s from the start.
David Hockney did the menu illustrations. Everybody came along. The spinach soufflé with anchovy sauce became an overnight hit — a dish that sounds wonderfully of its time. A bit like the photo of Sir Michael Caine looking nervously over at a table of young upstarts dining in the smoke-wreathed sunlight of the room: a table that held all of the Sex Pistols, apparently on their best behaviour. Not that mischief was discouraged. In fact, it came on the house. “Most nights,” the photographer Richard Young, who shot the room more than anyone else, once told me, “It was the Peter Langan show.” Can it really be true that Langan survived on 12 bottles of champagne a day? Or that he once used vintage Krug to put out a pan fire in the kitchen? Once, a diner approached him claiming she had discovered a cockroach in the bathroom. “Well, it can’t be one of ours,” Langan said. “This cockroach is dead. All ours are alive and healthy” — before popping the pest in his mouth and swallowing it whole. “Even if only half of it's true, it's still an incredible anecdotal output,” laughs Graziano Arricale, who has owned the place with James Hitchin since bringing it back to life post-covid, in 2021.
“It was the Peter Langan show…”
Baywatch stars David Charvet and Pamela Anderson outside Langan’s in 1993.
Langan’s co-founder Michael Caine and his wife Shakira at the brasserie in 1987.
Rod Stewart and Kelly Emberg leaving Langan’s.
Better documented (these things always are) were the feuds, the enemies. Of Marlon Brando, Langan said: “The only thing I knew about him was that he is even fatter than me”. He later barred Rudolf Nureyev “for being himself”. Orson Welles was berated as “a stupid fat fuck” (two out of three ain’t bad!) At another time, Langan wondered why the staff were doling out champagne to Ronnie Corbett. “Peter, he might be small but there was no need to tell him he’s a f***ing midget,” said Shepherd, who was often forced to be the voice of reason. Langan climbed up on Princess Margaret’s table during one of her romantic liaisons, knocking jugs and glasses over. AA Gill remembers him “eating a lady guest at the bar.” His party trick, once his legs had failed him, was to slither around and nibble at ankles.
“The glitterati loved to witness his pissed misbehaviour in the way that Victorians used to enjoy outings to Bedlam,” wrote Marina O’Loughlin.
And at the end of it all, Langan would sleep the sleep of the righteous. “He would wobble drunk down the aisle, fall on the floor and go to sleep,” Michael Winner wrote in 2007. “It was a colourful feature of Langan’s that you had to step over this recumbent man in a white suit.”
A glimpse of the Mayfair restaurant’s celebrity clientele.
(“I’ve also had quite adventurous times there,” Winner added, in a little nugget too good to leave out. “I took my friend O J Simpson and his wife Nicole after we’d been to see Cats. You may have heard they since parted in somewhat unusual circumstances…”)
Which all sounds pretty questionable, as does Langan’s enraged trick of hurling meat cleavers across the kitchen at shoddy chefs. But the man held a definite charm, a mad genius. “I miss him desperately. We were very close,” Shepherd told The Sunday Times in 2001. “Almost soul mates. A lot of the time, when I’m not sure what to do, I think: how would the old boy do it?”
Fifty years hence, the industry has far, far fewer characters of this nature. In fact, the entire planet does. “He was the original bad boy of the restaurant world,” says Arricale. “Life is just so very serious now, isn't it?”
“Life is just so very serious now, isn't it?”
It is, yes. But for one day this week, in a very particular corner of Mayfair, it wasn’t. To mark the 50th birthday of Langan’s, Arricale and co decided, for one day only, to run an extra long service — “1000 covers, which seemed like a nice round number,” Arricale says nervously — with everything on the menu at 1976 prices. Back then, you could buy a townhouse round the corner for 18 quid and a proper lunch with your bank manager. And it’s equally thrilling, in this vertiginously expensive moment, to entertain £2.50 martinis, or oysters for 60p or something. Somehow even more fun, don’t you think, than getting it all for free. A time-travel wormhole back to the Good Old Days. Isn’t that Henry Hill coming in through the back door? Didn’t Princess Margaret just scowl at me from a booth? On Tuesday night, the room thrummed with laughter, popped corks, old friendships, a sense of mischief. A woman who had been there during its late 1970s heyday pinched a cigarette from a younger model. An old boy told me a story I can’t repeat. A glass appeared in the hand unbidden. Down at Langan’s, fun is back on the menu.
