Restaurant spy: Atlantic

Restaurants are like movie stars: they become overnight sensations, enjoy 15 minutes of fame, and then slowly fade from view. The interesting feature of this arc is that the apex is reached relatively quickly, while the fall is very gradual. Nevertheless, once the process of decline has begun, it's very difficult to reverse.

Oliver Peyton, the ambitious Irish restaurateur, is hoping to do for the Atlantic Bar & Grill what Quentin Tarantino did for John Travolta. He's given it a facelift, hired a new chef and converted one of the bars into a private members' club, all in the hope of restoring it to its former glory. Will it work? Judging by the meal I ate there last week, it just might.

The Atlantic first opened its doors on 14 April 1994 and instantly became the coolest place in London. It wasn't the food that did it, nor even the cocktails in Dick's Bar, but the fact that Oliver Peyton somehow managed to secure a licence to sell alcohol until 3am. Extended licensing hours are rare in the West End in 2002, but back then the Atlantic was the only game in town. If you wanted a drink in Soho after 1am --and you weren't a member of the Groucho - the only alternative was a seedy dive on Great Windmill Street where you could expect to pay £200 for a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne.

The Atlantic was such a huge success that imitators started springing up all over the place and, within a year, London's demi-monde had moved on to the Met Bar. Their place was taken by the bridge-and-tunnel crowd and they, in turn, were replaced by the suburbanites. Today, it's about as fashionable as Trader Vic's. The life cycle of the trendy bar/restaurant is a familiar subject and no doubt you can take a course on it in the Cultural Studies department of Sheffield Polytechnic - sorry, Sheffield Hallam University. The question is: can a restaurant that was once cool regain its fashionable status?

At least Oliver Peyton has got the food right. The menu reminded me of Pastis, the 'hot boîte' in New York's meat-packing district: it's the kind of food which people think of as typically French but which only exists outside France. Steak frites is the mainstay of this type of menu and I can attest that the version on offer at the Atlantic is very respectable.

Another hopeful sign was the absence of anyone in the dining room who looked remotely trendy. These were the kind of middle-aged no-hopers who wouldn't have been able to get past the clipboard Nazi at the front door in the Atlantic's heyday. If a restaurant is about to make a comeback, these are precisely the sort of customers you'd expect to see. Clearly, the Atlantic's downward trajectory is bottoming out. It's poised to be discovered by a new generation of young hipsters who, with a bit of luck, will decide it's so galactically uncool it's actually quite trendy.

Something like this happened to Hush Puppies in America in the mid-Nineties. In 1994, so few pairs were being sold that Wolverine, the company that makes them, was thinking of phasing them out. But then something odd happened. A group of club kids in New York decided that Hush Puppies were so out, so hopelessly ungroovy, that they were in and, almost overnight, they passed through the fashion equivalent of the fourth dimension. Annual sales rose from 30,000 in 1994 to 430,000 in 1995 and, before long, Hush Puppies were on sale in every mall in America.

Will the Atlantic Bar & Grill follow in their footsteps? I'm not certain, but I have a sneaking suspicion it will.