London has seen a return to retro with recent openings

Arguably the restaurant never fully recovered from the loss of its namesake founder, eventually closing in autumn 2020 before being bought by James Hitchen, the former chief executive of East Coast Concepts, and Graziano Arricale, who knows Mayfair inside out from his time as operations director of Birley Clubs.

The new Langan's looks very different to the old incarnation – not least because Peter Langan's famous art collection was sold in 2012 to keep the business afloat. Forty years of clutter have been replaced by a sleek green and cream colour scheme inspired, Arricale says, by the 1970s fashion designer Halston without it being in thrall to the decade that style forgot. And yet, read the menu, with the signature dish of spinach soufflé with anchovy and hollandaise sauce, and it might be 1976 all over again.

"The menu we inherited was going a bit off the rails," Arricale explains. "There were some very odd things on there that were a sign of a restaurant trying to move with the times but forgetting what it was. We've taken the classic best sellers and the famous signatures and transplanted them onto a new menu of brasserie dishes focused on prime ingredients. There's nowhere to hide with this kind of menu: everyone knows what lobster thermidor, Dover sole or a good fish pie should taste like, which puts more pressure on the team to deliver."

Arguably the greatest pressure, however, is relaunching a restaurant so fondly entrenched in many people's memories as the place where they were taken by their parents or celebrated a landmark anniversary. "Thankfully, it seems the old regulars are delighted and I hope that we've managed to secure the brand for another 40 years," Arricale says.

It's a Manzi's world

Langan's is just one of several recent high-profile London openings with one foot firmly in the past. This year will see the revival of another affectionately-remembered name when Jeremy King and Christopher Corbin's Corbin & King opens Manzi's just off Soho Square. The original restaurant closed in 2006 after an 80-year run as one of Theatreland's most famous fish restaurants. King says that while he and Corbin are not planning a wholesale revival of the brand, they own the name and have sought the blessing of the Manzi family to use it.

"We're not reproducing the menu in any literal way, but more the feeling of fun and slight nostalgia," King says. "Manzi's will be quite different from what is normally expected of a Corbin & King restaurant – not a pastiche, but quite tongue-in-cheek in terms of the interiors. Having said that, Manzi's will be a restaurant for our time with a mostly pescatarian menu and a lot of plant-based dishes as well."

Corbin and King first went down the retro route at the Colony at the Beaumont, the Mayfair hotel now owned by billionaire businessman Wafic Saïd. The dining room reopened last August with former Zetter Group head chef Ben Boeynaems as executive head chef, while the decor has been lightened and brightened by New York-based Thierry Despont following feedback from customers that the restaurant was too dark. But comfortable surroundings aside, why is there currently such an appetite to embrace retro dining?

Hungry for history

"I think customers are yearning for something familiar but also glamorous following the lockdowns of the past two years," says Leni Miras, the hotel's food and beverage operations manager. "Food has always been a source of comfort and nostalgia for a lot of people. Diners want to go out and celebrate, and what we do at the Colony brings a sense of occasion to eating out."

Dishes such as New York shrimp cocktail and porterhouse steak with red wine bordelaise nod towards grill rooms of the mid-20th century, while restaurant theatre includes a McCarthy salad mixed tableside, bananas Foster flambéed in rum on a trolley, and bespoke sundaes made by ticking off a list of toppings and fillings.

"Our guests feel pampered by having their food prepared next to them and being looked after by knowledgeable staff who were retained through lockdown," Miras says. "It is really important for me to offer those sorts of dishes that you want to eat again and again. You might want to dress up for a celebration or pop in for a shepherd's pie after shopping in Selfridge's. That variety is what makes the Colony such a timeless place to be."

Being inspired by the past doesn't mean being stuck in the past, however. When legendary Theatreland hangout Joe Allen, which was founded in New York in 1965 and launched in London in 1977, reopened in October, Russell Norman was drafted in to oversee the bar. Norman had worked at Joe Allen as everything from waiter to bartender, maitre d' and manager between 1989 and 1999, as well as being a long-term friend of co-owner Lawrence Hartley.

"Russell has introduced a tightly focused cocktail list of speedily brought-together drinks and great punchy flavours," Hartley says. "And he is on the Joe Allen board now. Russell can see restaurants from the consumers' point of view so clearly. He's a lovely breath of fresh air."

Food duties, meanwhile, now fall to former exec chef of the Ivy, Gary Lee, who is cooking the most comforting of comfort food menus: garlic-buttered forest mushrooms on sourdough toast; slow-braised smoked baby back ribs with slaw; apple pie with Bakewell ice-cream.

Such dishes and drinks might seem retro, but it is the timeless appeal of the menu that is the key to Joe Allen's enduring success, Hartley believes. "London has seen such an expansion of middle-market restaurants in the past decade that there's a terrific opportunity for heritage restaurants to re-establish themselves. Joe Allen is an easy sell, partly because we have people bringing their children who were themselves first brought as kids by their own parents. And partly because we don't do anything too complicated. It's hearty, well-executed food served in a lovely ambience.

It's not just the food that is comforting, though. "You feel like you're coming home when you enter Joe Allen," Hartley says. "It's very convivial, and there's an almost promiscuous feel to the table-hopping of the regulars who all know each other. It feels like a safe space."

Welcome home

It might seem as if there's a paradox to rarely changing menus attracting a regular clientele but often these are dishes unavailable anywhere else: the spinach soufflé at Langan's, the McCarthy salad at the Colony, Game Bird's baked Alaska or Joe Allen's off-menu cheeseburger that is the worst-kept secret in the West End. Nowhere, however, beats the most regular customer at Oslo Court in London's St John's Wood, who once a week orders salmon en papillote, infused with lemon, fennel, dill and white wine sauce.

"We do the same thing that we've been doing for 40 years," general manager David Rama says. "We just add a few new dishes here and there. The main thing is that we are very flexible. Anything can be tweaked."

The current incarnation of Oslo Court was opened by brothers Tony and José Sanchez in 1982 and Rama reckons that only 15% of the menu has changed since then. Where else, for instance, will you find crab à La Rochelle – pastry-wrapped crustacean in a rich cream sauce, with a jug of brandy sauce on the side, cooked by José's son José? Or roast duck with orange sauce, fillets of Dover sole Véronique, chicken princess and baskets of Melba toast?

Oslo Court's location on the ground floor of a 1930s mansion block and a dining room decorated in soft-focus shades of pink and peach are equally unchanging, as too is the presence of Neil Heshmat, who last year was named as Britain's most-loved waiter for his 45 years of unstinting devotion to the restaurant's sweet trolley.

"Fifty per cent of things going right is recognising the customer coming through the door," Rama says. "When you use their name, you can see their faces light up and everything runs a lot more smoothly. Even if something goes wrong, they're more forgiving. People have missed that human touch during the past two years."

Old-fashioned technique

Otto Tepasse opened his eponymous restaurant on an unprepossessing stretch of Gray's Inn Road in 2011. The Austrian's extensive CV starts with a commis chef role at the Grill Room of the Berlin Kempinski in 1974. "There were nine tables, 26 waiters and every single thing was done at the table. I would make lobster cocktail, taking the lobster out of the shell in front of customers. There were crêpes suzette and fraises Romanoff. The restaurant opened at 8pm and closed at 3am. We would polish all the silver in the afternoon. I've never seen such amazing table service."

Pride of place at Otto's goes to the duck press, originally made for the Hotel Provençal in Juan-les-Pins in 1927 (Tepasse is still repaying the loan he took out to buy it).

A whole Challans duck is flambéed tableside in red wine and brown sugar; the seared liver is served as a starter with morels atop toasted brioche, followed by the breast with a sauce made by extracting the juices from the carcass, and a third course of confit leg with seared foie gras and black truffle sauce.

No one expected the restaurant to succeed, and yet now Tepasse has visitors come from all over the world for his pressed duck, which was joined by a lobster press in 2015. The three-course feast, which must be ordered in advance, does not come cheap at £190, but the restaurant sells 24 ducks a week.

"People thought we would fail because we were too old-fashioned," Tepasse says. "But of course, that's exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to be old-fashioned – old-fashioned in the sense of classic." And as any arbiter of fashion will tell you, classic never goes out of style.

Caine Reaction

A visit from a famous former proprietor would make any new restaurateur feel nervous, but when the old owner is Sir Michael Caine – and he has brought Joan Collins as his guest – the pressure to pull out all the stops is even higher.

"He couldn't have been more supportive," Langan's co-owner Graziano Arricale recalls of Sir Michael's dinner before Christmas. "I had a good half-hour chat with him and I asked what he thought of the new Langan's. He said that he was incredibly happy with what we've done. The business was a big part of his life and he was very keen for us to succeed."

And Collins? "She thought the food was excellent. They were both having a really good time, telling lots of jokes. I think they're wonderful." Unlike Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, this is one dining room Collins needn't worry about being thrown out of.