The model for this venture was the Zanzibar, on the Holborn fringe of Covent Garden, which in its short life in the late 70s and early 80s had attracted — had perhaps even created — a clientele which belonged to a recognisable if yet undefined caste. Publishers don’t actually run clubs. So the entrepreneurs behind the Zanzibar — Tony Mackintosh, the architect Tchaik Chassay and the wine merchant John Armit — were sought out to bring some professionalism to the Groucho. They brought in as the general manager Liam Carson.

This was an inspired choice. For the next decade Carson, more than anyone else, more certainly than the actors and writers habitually associated with it, set the tone of the Groucho. Rather, he set the nocturnal tone of the place. In his early thirties he retained the looks of an unusually dissipated cherub and carried with him a faint but distinct whiff of danger — and the inchoate prescience of future self-destruction. He was, unmistakably, a deep-diver, a hedonist who led by example yet who knew well the price of libertinism. It is hardly surprising that Carson should have served a rackety apprenticeship with another lapsed Irish Catholic, Peter Langan, whom he rather perversely regarded as a sort of exemplar.

Carson, born in Coventry in 1954, had drifted into the world of bars and restaurants by chance. After dropping out of Bristol University, working as a hospital porter in that city and abandoning accountancy articles he found himself sharing a London flat with a group that included Chris Corbin, the future proprietor of le Caprice, the Ivy and the Wolseley. Corbin got him a job as a washer-up at the Blitz Club. Such was the turnover of staff that he became manager within a few weeks. He then went to work with Corbin at Langans Brasserie which was in 1977 the hottest restaurant in London. The kitchen might have been baleful but that was no more a drawback to its success then than it is today. The point of the place was that it was a circus of misbehaviour. The manager Andrew Leman was the ringmaster while the owner was an antic and not invariably benevolent clown. Langan’s champagne-fuelled feats became the stuff of urban legend. Carson learnt quickly. Perhaps too quickly, for no sooner had he been appointed assistant manager than he and Leman were dismissed by the chef Richard Shepherd. But Carson was now hooked on a life of late nights, perpetual parties, intoxicants. He went to work for the extrovert American restaurateur Bob Payton, opened a couple of theme outfits for him and then moved on to Richard Branson’s Roof Gardens with its clientele of Middle Eastern wideboys and their escorts.

He had so far worked in establishments that were gastronomically indifferent. This rankled: Carson was both gourmet and gourmand. The Groucho was, in this regard, a challenge. And while he was seldom able in either of its restaurants to achieve a consistency that satisfied him he proved himself an astute judge of chefs, organised countless one-off lunches and dinners, and pursued a complementary career as a culinary contributor to Robert Elms’s BBC London radio show and as a food writer for GQ.

During the day the Groucho was akin to a trade fair. Dull journalists and dull “creatives” pitched derivative articles and formats to dull editors and dull producers. These long days were alleviated only by such drunken miscreants as the (by then also literally) legless, wheelchaired Jeff Bernard and Daniel Farson who, despite his friendship with Carson, had his membership cancelled when one of his rent boys ransacked the guests’ rooms. When Farson was readmitted he peed against the bar, perhaps believing himself to be in the Colony. Carson argued on his behalf that this was not unreasonable given that he would probably have fallen and injured himself on the way to the toilet. But he was again banned at the behest of members whom Carson regarded as over-squeamish killjoys.

At night things were different. Under Carson’s benign, louche, amused eye it became — famously, notoriously — a zone of tolerance, and a better party than Langan’s ever was. By the mid-90s attendance to the milieu which he himself had largely devised was taking its toll. His wife Gabby insisted he should quit. They moved to Moustiers-Sainte Marie in the arrière-pays of Nice near the Verdon gorges, where he attempted to write a sitcom. But occasional journalism and hanging out with slumming writers are no preparations for composition itself — and whatever other aptitudes the indefatigably gregarious Carson possessed disciplined solitude was not among them.

On his return to England he embarked again on a peripatetic career in restauration. He was one of the group that, with Damien Hirst, set up Pharmacy, a venture which he realised from early on was liable to prove ill starred because it was too founded in fashionability and gimmickry: his restaurative instincts were thoughtfully conservative. Plans to open a pub serving simple food in rural Norfolk came to nothing. Later he worked at Levant in Marylebone and at a short-lived enterprise overlooking Leicester Square. But he never recaptured the exhausting joie de vivre that he had enjoyed and suffered during the decade was he was the greatest of London’s professional hosts and one to rank alongside Muriel Belcher, Rosa Lewis and Peter Langan.

He is survived by his wife and their daughter.

Liam Carson, restaurateur, was born on May 23, 1954. He died on July 6, 2005, aged 51.