Local & Essential · Hong Kong
Bar Leone
"The best bar in Asia, and I still haven't eaten the mortadella."
1—1 / 41
Hong Kong is serious about its bar scene. Nine Hong Kong bars appeared on the 2024 Asia's 50 Best Bars list, second only to Singapore across the continent. The highest-ranked among them was Bar Leone, which opened in June 2023 and debuted on the list the following year straight at number one. The first bar in the history of the 50 Best to top the rankings in its debut year. That same year it landed at number two on the World's 50 Best Bars, the best result a Hong Kong bar has ever achieved.
2—8 / 41
Behind it is Lorenzo Antinori. Born in Rome, he spent three years studying law before walking away and getting behind a bar for the first time in Australia. Then four years at The Savoy American Bar in London, then a move to Ryan Chetiyawardana's Dandelyan, which was named World's Best Bar in 2018 while Antinori was there. After that, Seoul: head bartender at Charles H in the Four Seasons. Then Hong Kong in 2019, and four years later, his own place. Bar Leone is where all of that led, and it is also a letter to Rome. I visited Charles H in Seoul after Bar Leone, and the two places are so different in atmosphere and style that it is hard to believe the same person made them both.
The first night, it was well past eleven. We had just finished dinner at VEA in Central and decided to make it a second stop. It was raining hard that night, the kind of rain where an umbrella barely helps. We climbed the hill anyway, soaked. Even at that hour the place was packed. We hesitated at the door, almost turned back, but a staff member found us a small corner spot. Worth it, we thought. And then we sat down, reached for the menu, and tried to order the Italian snacks. They had stopped serving food. The mortadella sandwich, gone before we arrived.
10—15 / 41
The next night, the three of us tried again. Last day of the Hong Kong trip, we told ourselves, so we have to eat it today. We finished dinner nearby and moved earlier than the night before. But the snack last order was ten-thirty. We missed it again. Two nights, two climbs, two sandwiches that never happened. I still think about it. If I go back to Hong Kong, that sandwich will be the first reason.
25—29 / 41
Two nights, two climbs, two sandwiches that never happened. I still think about it.
The sandwich was a miss but Bar Leone itself was not. Walking in, you are surrounded by vintage Italian pop culture posters and photographs, and the music pulls it all together into something that feels less like a designed concept and more like an actual neighbourhood bar in Rome. Not a bar that has been designed to feel like one, just a bar that actually is one. The bars I have been to before this one tend to use décor as theatre. Here the warmth just sits there, unhurried, and you want to stay in it. One detail in particular kept pulling at me: on one side of the room, the blinds on the window let in thin strips of light from the street lamps outside. The way that light fell across people's faces and the wall decorations made me reach for my camera again and again. The second night was our last night in Hong Kong, which made the atmosphere feel that much more vivid.
3—24 / 41
The bar's philosophy is "Cocktail Popolari": cocktails for the people. Simplicity, speed, and flavour over spectacle. While most bars chasing Asia's and the world's best rankings are stacking complexity and drama into the glass, Bar Leone walks the other direction. But simple does not mean shallow. Lifting the glass and inhaling, there is something considerably more layered than expected. Over two nights the three of us worked through almost the entire menu. Most of it was good, and the one that stayed with us was the Margarita de Maiz: smoked corn, mezcal, gin, lime. Sweet and bright up front, then a thread of smoke and corn running underneath. The balance was right, and next to everything else on the menu it stood out clearly. I ordered it out of curiosity the first night, the others tasted it, and we all ordered it again.
12—38 / 41
While most bars chasing Asia's and the world's best rankings are stacking complexity and drama into the glass, Bar Leone walks the other direction.
Two nights of rain, two climbs up the hill, two sandwiches we never got to eat. That corner seat on the last night of a Hong Kong trip, a drink in hand while the rain came down outside, turned out to be one of those things you carry with you. Bar Leone will be the first name I think of when I think about going back. Next time, before ten-thirty. And this time, the mortadella.
39—41 / 41
What Bar Leone did in its first eighteen months, reaching Asia's 50 Best Bars at number one on debut and World's 50 Best at number two, is less interesting than how it did it. The philosophy Antinori calls Cocktail Popolari, drinks for everyone, fast and precise and without theatre, runs against the dominant tendency in competitive bar culture, where complexity of technique and length of presentation have become proxies for quality. Bar Leone makes the opposite argument: that a drink mixed well and served immediately, in a room that feels like somewhere rather than something, is the harder thing to achieve and the more lasting thing to remember.
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