My Round: They're all shook up at the home of London's cocktail explosion

... and it's not just the drinks list that's new

Oliver Peyton, owner of the Atlantic Bar & Grill, says that when he opened the bar/ restaurant in 1994, "the only place in London where you could get a good Martini was Duke's Hotel" in St James's. If that is an exaggeration, it exaggerates little. There are so many soi-disant cocktail bars in London at the moment, you could be forgiven for thinking they've been here since Pepys made the last entry in his diary. But the "explosion" in cocktail activity, as Peyton describes it, is largely a creation of the past decade – the past five years in particular. And the Atlantic deserves much of the credit for lighting the fuse.

The Atlantic was the first in various ways. It brought in a door policy, policed by men with big muscles. It explicitly identified the people behind the drinks, calling its premier space Dick's Bar after Dick Bradsell, the cocktail-maestro who opened it. And, most importantly, it officially proved that you could drink cocktails even if you were closer to your 20th birthday than your 60th. These notions lit the fuse, with cocktail expertise spreading outside London to places such as the top-rated Mojo in Leeds.

In the catering world, however, fuses don't stay lit all by themselves. Some of the bars that followed in the Atlantic's wake, especially LAB and the various Match bars, seemed to carry the flame. The Atlantic started to look tired – a place for tourists and suburbanites. Peyton himself admits that "we sat on our arses with Dick's Bar". But they're not sitting there anymore. They've just managed to hire Jamie Terrell away from LAB. Terrell, whose name has appeared frequently in this column, is the best young bartender in the UK. He began his London bartending career at the Atlantic, working under Bradsell, then moved on to LAB and stayed for just under four years. Around a month ago, he went back to the Atlantic.

Which means that this old stalwart is once again at the top of any serious cocktail-hound's list. The Art Deco room looks little different, the crowd is still – despite the bouncers posted at the front door – the usual mix of the young, the hip, and the outlandishly ordinary. But as word gets out that JT has returned, the Atlantic will almost certainly get its former buzz back.

This doesn't mean Terrell is going to be behind the bar every night. Part of his deal – arranged with Peyton's help – was to serve as a "bar development manager" for Restaurant Associates, the division of the Compass group to which Peyton sold his Admiralty restaurant last year. But Jamie wasn't hired as a "celebrity bartender". "My view of bartending has changed a lot since I opened the Atlantic," says Peyton. "Running a bar is about professionalism and reliability. I wanted to pare down what the Atlantic does and make it reliable – to go back to basics. I felt that this was a time to go slow, rather than fast." With customers more discerning now ("they can tell good from bad"), Peyton needed someone to get the place back to those basics. And the person he wanted was Jamie Terrell.

A new cocktail list is in the works as we speak, and should be on offer by the time this article appears. Watch out for a tall gin-based drink made with ginger and lemongrass – it was in development when I went there and may turn out to be a humdinger. Make haste to drink a Viva, already a winner: kind of like a berry Caipirinha with Chambord (black raspberry liqueur). Or one of the best Sidecars ever seen in London. Terrell is working closely with the Atlantic's staff, and in the bar biz, as elsewhere in catering, training is nine-tenths of the key to success. With Terrell in charge, I'd bet Dick's Bar will get its second wind before too long.