Carson and Hirst were already long gone, and the burly bouncers who'd once manned the doors had disappeared. In late 2000, the Hartford Group had to be rescued from near bankruptcy and Freud was removed from its board.
By the time the saga ended, Matthew Freud said: 'I have a group of people who I've made promise to that if I ever say I'm going to buy a restaurant again, they are to hold me against a wall and punch me very hard.' Hirst lost patience with it when he found unpaid bar staff picketing the entrance. By the end of 1999, it was history, in cool terms. Within nine months of its opening on New Year's Eve 1997, the Pharmacy had been sold by Freud and his backers to the Hartford Group, an investment company specialising in City-boy bars.
A set of six of those plastic ashtrays fetched nearly £2,000 at Sotheby's in 2004. You had another drink and then you left, probably pocketing one of the pill-box-shaped ashtrays. Celebrity-fusion was a trademark of the successful cool restaurant. No one you ever met actually ate there - no one did much eating then, anyway - but for a few months in 1998 it seemed that everyone had taken a seat on the pill-shaped bar stools and drunk a Cough Syrup cocktail beside - oh, probably John Malkovich, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and Norman Lamont. Liam Carson of the Groucho Club looked after the kitchen and everything else. The artist installed a six-foot model of his own DNA and decked the walls with Dihydrocodeine packets and varicose-vein treatments the PR got the backers and the celebrities in. Damien Hirst and Matthew Freud acquired a run-down Greek restaurant on the summit of Notting Hill. The idea for the Pharmacy was simple enough. It was the offspring of the decade's cockiest PR man and its savviest artist - a mating that, at that peculiar time, made perfect sense. The Atlantic's longevity was unusual: by the end of the Nineties, with central London in renaissance and money flooding into the high-end dining business, restaurants had a cool life often measured in months. (The Atlantic's lease has now passed to Luke Johnson of Pizza Express, but Peyton still promises it will return within three years.) It was long enough to establish the Atlantic sufficiently so that, when celebrity moved on, as celebrity does, the restaurant survived.
Thus the Atlantic's Art-Deco halls certainly became one of the coolest places for a good three mid-Nineties years - a time when the thesp-hack glamour axis was the province largely of private members' clubs. Oliver Peyton was a night-club owner who had a notion of injecting late-night celebrity glitz into the still embryonic world of smart, young London dining. ' It's hard-won, that title, and in the Nineties it seemed to change hands every time someone thought up a new move with a scallop. He opened the doors of the Atlantic on 14 April 1994 and before long it was considered the coolest place in town. 'It once attracted the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Ben Elton, Lenny Henry, Kate Moss, Madonna, Robert de Niro and Harvey Keitel. ' wrote the London Evening Standard last October of the closure of Oliver Peyton's great West End pleasure dome, the Atlantic Bar & Grill. 'Bailiffs have moved into the venue, which was a popular haunt with celebrities during the 1990s. Just a poignant paragraph at the back of the news pages. They don't do obituaries for once-great restaurants.
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