Andrew Leeman was an ebullient bon vivant who lived life to the full but at the same time made sure that the guests at his restaurants enjoyed themselves.

Leeman was the ideal front-of-house man, a talent he ably demonstrated at Morton’s in Berkeley Square and at Langan’s Brasserie in its glory days. He was famed as the man who refused Mick Jagger entry to Langan’s for being improperly dressed. At Morton’s he decided where the beautiful people sat, including Diana, Princess of Wales, a frequent guest. But he was generous too. One winter night he found a tramp outside Morton’s, brought him in, fed him, and then, mischievously, put him in one of the chauffeured Rolls-Royces always outside and sent him round Berkeley Square to Annabel’s.

His sparkle and love of life imbued all his restaurants and hotels. The gossip columnist Nigel Dempster (obituary, July 13, 2007 ) called him “the most handsome man in London”, and his blonde hair, blue eyes and suntan enchanted many women diners. The restaurant critic Fay Maschler said that he strode through Langan’s “like a Greek god”.

Andrew Richard Alexander Leeman was born in 1946. After schooling at Embley Park near Romsey in Hampshire – where he inaugurated the custom of bringing in a busload of girls for school dances – he decided that the family horticultural business and country life were not for him and studied catering at Westminster College.

On returning to London after graduating from the Lausanne Hotel School he came to the notice of Sir Hugh Wontner, chairman of the Savoy Group, who offered him a graduate trainee post. Leeman worked his way round the Savoy, Claridge’s and the Berkeley’s new Perroquet restaurant.

His Savoy days gave him an offbeat celebrity. His long-time partner Maxine White introduced him to John Cleese, and they became friends, drawn together, it was said, by a love of backgammon, food and wine. In 1977, to avoid the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in London, they went for a holiday on Hydra where Cleese picked Leeman’s brains about his worst hotel experience. Leeman told Cleese it was when he was a trainee and had found a dead body in a Savoy bedroom and had to remove it discreetly. This became the basis for the 1979 Kipper and the Corpse episode of Fawlty Towers in which Basil serves out-of-date kippers to a guest who then dies. In honour of the story’s source, the dead guest was named Andrew Leeman.

Leeman’s first pre-Savoy catering effort was working with his sister at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre for Sir Clement Freud who became a friend and later chairman of his London restaurant group. Other early entrepreneurial food ventures were selling his grandmother’s apples at the Isle of Wight festival and, with Maxine White, selling soup at a Yorkshire pop festival during one of the worst ever recorded storms – she recalled that the soup just blew away.

His first managerial job was at Daisy in the Kings Road. After a few years, with the support of friends, he opened his first restaurant, the Sussex in Pimlico, to which Princess Margaret came.

After working at Morton’s in Berkeley Square, which opened in 1976, he moved to Langan’s Brasserie where he occasionally had to rescue the owner Peter Langan from the gutter and dust down his white suit. When Leeman left, Langan offered him a choice of the paintings in the restaurant or £1,000. Leeman opted for the cash – unfortunately for him the paintings went on to become worth much more.

Leeman adored the US and often visited Texas to pursue his passion for shooting. He liked the food and decided that Britain was ready for nachos, burritos, tacos and margaritas and opened his Texas Lone Star Saloon on the corner of Gloucester Road and Harrington Gardens on July 4, 1980. The large Native American Indian figure that stood outside was such a noted landmark it formed part of the London taxi drivers’ “knowledge”.

Leeman employed a former Playboy bunny girl, Marilyn Coles, as his greeter, and waitresses used rollerskates. Even though the food was affordable, Leeman made the ambience glamorous and fun. Other Texas Lone Star restaurants followed, in Chiswick and Queensway, and in 1984, with his partners Simon Lowe and Howard Malin, he opened the first Palms restaurant in Kensington, serving Italian food. Other restaurants included Tall Orders with starter-style English food presented in oriental steamer baskets; Steamboat Charlie’s and Casper’s Bar Grill and Telephone Exchange in Hanover Square where every table had its own telephone.

The three partners moved on into hotels in 1989, buying the Feathers in Woodstock. They created more of a restaurant-with-rooms atmosphere though it initially struggled at the start of the Gulf War when their American clientele dropped away. In 1995 they bought Bishopstrow, a country house hotel “in the wrong part of Wiltshire”, and sold it in 2001.

After this Leeman gradually divested himself of his businesses, motivated partly by the increasing red tape in the catering industry and partly by his failing health.

A great party man – he celebrated his 60th birthday on a Pimlico rooftop with caviar and vodka – and latterly a member of the Garrick, he was not one for a tidy, bill-paying life or conventional hobbies. Shooting and fishing were his great relaxations and to a lesser extent skiing.

In May 1987 he married the Florida socialite and heiress Shannon Porter in the Galápagos islands. She and their son and daughter survive him.

Andrew Leeman, restaurateur and hotelier, was born on July 27, 1946. He died of cancer on August 12, 2007, aged 61