Langan's Brasserie

Posted on 2016/12/13 18:12:18 (December 2016).

[Thursday 24th November 2016]
I just happened to have stumbled across a review of Langan's Brasserie by Tom Parker Bowles earlier this month, which somehow rather piqued my interest. Mainly because of the tales of the eponymous Peter Langan and his generally reprehensible but often hilarious behaviour toward customers.

I'd been in another one of my slumps, finding life of late largely rather mired in drudgery, and so this tiny window into a place and time with altogether more, um, I don't know quite what the right word for it is... (joie de vivre? glamour? excitement?). Anyway, whatever it was I was briefly happy to find a small slice of it, even if it was an imaginary morsel, in a place which now is only a shadow of its former self.

My attempts to abate my increasingly debilitating and chronic case of ennui frequently end up being lonely endeavours. The things in which I find some hope of elevation from the banal reality of day to day existence do not always appeal to my peers. I presume in part because none of them suffer maladjustment to the degree I do. Sometimes though they'll agree to come along for the ride anyway, typically for lack of any better suggestions, and that was the case this evening. I managed to drag four of the usual suspects along for dinner at Langan's, none of them exhibiting a great deal of enthusiasm about the idea, but they came anyway.

Of course, Peter Langan has long since shuffled off this mortal coil, and what he left behind is really a place in which to remember (or, in my case, imagine) what the restaurant used to be like in its heyday. As one reviewer commented - attempting to be disparaging - hardly any of the customers are under 40. Good, I thought. I'm a bit sick of hipster restaurants pandering to twenty somethings anyway. I couldn't help but wonder how many of the other customers at the restaurant have in fact been coming for decades. Today, the service is professional, and if anything perhaps lacking personality a bit. No ankles will be bitten, and no lewd comments will be addressed to visiting European royalty... but still I thought I saw a twinkle in the eye of some of my fellow diners this evening who had perhaps witnessed some of those many tales of Mr Langan firsthand.

It is hard to put my finger on why I enjoyed Langan's so much this evening. I think perhaps in part I felt the ghost of the incorrigible former proprietor gave me carte blanche to do a bit of bon vivanting. Perhaps it was that exciting mixture of what is really quite a smart and upmarket eatery famed for - admittedly now historic - bad behaviour. Not that I, or any of my dining companions, were particularly badly behaved. We were a bit on the loud side at times, and we certainly worked our way through a sizable chunk of the Champagne section of the wine list, but that was, sadly, about the extent of it.

Maybe I just needed a bit of unfettered excess.

Anyway, the visit to Langan's proved a pivotal point in my ever changing interests in things. I had bought Peter Langan's autobiography - a Life in Food - which he'd only really started on before he died, and so to make a decent book of it a lot was added by his friend, Brian Sewell. It transpires that Langan was not just a restaurateur and generator of celebrity slurs but also quite a well respected art collector. The original collection that had hung in Langan's had been sold a few years ago and made quite a tidy sum (the replacement art which now adorns the walls was, at least in our section of the restaurant, a bit crap).

I actually found the parts Brian Sewell wrote as interesting as Peter Langan's own auto-biographical scribblings. This led to me re-evaluating Brian Sewell, somebody I was only dimly aware of. I found the fact that he seems to be widely despised very encouraging as the sort of person I might take an interest in, and ordered the DVD of his Grand Tour around Italy, which over the next 2 or 3 weeks I enjoyed rather a lot.

It also kindled a bit of an interest in art, thinking this might be another potential avenue via which to escape the banal. A modest collection, perhaps?

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