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. Although the wine list is limited, Papa Razzi offers some interesting and fairly priced tasting flights of three two-ounce pours of each varietal.They don't do obituaries for once-great restaurants. For an entrée, we suggest the lombatina di vitello, a bone-in center-cut 14-ounce veal chop with wild mushrooms, Marsala and fresh vegetables. Start with gamberi allo spiedo-grilled shrimp with braised spinach and lemon vinaigrette-or the panzanella-a variation on the classic salad with mixed greens, capers, tomatoes, torn focaccia and Vermont goat cheese in a red wine vinaigrette.
The food is modern Italian, defined as a brighter, lighter take on the traditional, and it succeeds with thin-crust pizzas from a wood-burning oven, pasta dishes with light sauces and hearty entrées. Located in the tony Mall at Short Hills, Papa Razzi provides a respite for the harried shopper as well as an attractive dining destination for couples, friends and families, even when the high-end shops surrounding it are closed for the day.
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