Inside the design of Hong Kong’s Bar Leone
Bar Leone debuted at number two on The World's 50 Best Bars 2024 list — the thinking behind the design shows why.
This story appears in Bottled magazine — you can still get a copy of the first issue at bottledmag.com.
I’ve just landed back in Sydney after a couple weeks abroad, and attending The World’s 50 Best Bars ceremony in Madrid last week. What a night it was — Caretaker’s Cottage took out the highest spot on the list for an Australian bar (at number 21) and you can see the full list here.
But one of the big stories on the night was the spectacular debut on the list of Hong Kong’s Bar Leone. The bar comes from influential bartender Lorenzo Antinori (he counts the American Bar at The Savoy and London’s Dandelyan on his resume), with his ode to the Italian neighbourhood bars of his youth landing at number two on the list this year. It is the highest ever debut for a bar on the list, and comes after the bar was named number one on the Asia’s 50 Best Bars list back in July.
That’s an impressive result for a bar that is just a little over a year old.
But as I found out talking to Lorenzo for this piece that appeared in Bottled magazine, there’s a great deal of thought and attention that has gone into every aspect of Bar Leone. That success is no accident, and you can read the story below.
Re-reading the piece, I was struck by the simplicity of the drink design at Bar Leone — an approach which, when you consider that the bars which make the top 10 of The World’s 50 Best list tend to have complicated drinks, is an uncommon one.
Maybe, though, this turn to simplicity — which is hard to get right, because there is nowhere to hide — is a sign of things to come.
While I have you — the deadline for the public vote for the People’s Drink of the Year award at the Drink of the Year Awards this month is tonight. The form closes at 11:59PM AEST, so if there’s a cocktail you love, vote for it now at boothby.com.au/drinkoftheyear.
Lorenzo Antinori is a details guy.
“At the bar I grew up going to with my dad and my brother, buying the newspaper, having a coffee or Campari soda, whatever, you always had the cashier, this old lady and then behind her there were frames of Padre Pio — the Pope — and then Maradona,” Antinori says. “Maybe you have a family photo of a Christmas dinner.”
Antinori has worked at storied hotel bars (American Bar at The Savoy, say), and modern age world beaters (he was head bartender at Dandelyan in London, at Charles H. at the Four Seasons in Seoul, and opened Argo for the Four Seasons in Hong Kong).1 But Bar Leone — which is the first bar he owns himself — strikes a different tone.
“I decided to go back to simplicity: let’s just do a neighbourhood bar,” he says. “But a neighbourhood bar where you have a lot of small details that people can capture with their eyes.”
Building a world on the walls.
“It’s the same everywhere in the world,” Antinori says. “When you enter a shop, especially those that are old, that have some heritage — family–run businesses — you always enter into a universe. It’s a microcosmos of the family who own the business.”
Antinori drew upon that neighbourhood feel and his own experiences in the design for Bar Leone.
“You might see things on the wall, or little details that are part of their history — they make the place very personal and comfortable and relatable,” Antinori says.
“We describe it as a disorganised chaos. Bar Leone is very much inspired by Italian pop culture and things that I grew up with when I was a kid, things that I grew up seeing on television.
“All those details are essential for us to tell a story. They really create layers.”
Antinori grew up in Rome, in the neighbourhood of Trastevere in the 1980s and 90s; the bars he cherishes today from that time are the type he once went to with his family.
“These bars, they’re not necessarily cocktail bars.“ Antinori says. “They are places that you go for a coffee in the morning or you have a pastry, or there is always an old guy playing video poker. You can smoke inside and you buy cigarettes2, you buy the lotto.
“In those bars, there are always the greatest characters — they are people who were born in the neighbourhood, they were born in that street and they speak still the real slang language. You see all those little elements of pop culture that always fascinated me.”
1. Antinori has had some notable mentors: from Erik Lorincz at American Bar at The Savoy; Chris Moore at the Beaufort Bar, also housed in The Savoy; Ryan Chetiya-wardana and Iain Griffiths at Dandelyan.
2. “That’s why we have the tabacchi sign outside, right?” says Lorenzo Antinori.
“Trastevere, where I grew up.”
Antinori has built for himself something of a home away from home. Trastevere is a neighbourhood with old working class roots and cobbled streets, and home to a particular inspiration for Antinori.
“We were looking at these 1970s, 1980s fonts,” he says. “We took a lot of references from old Italian signage, and in Rome, there is a bar called Bar San Calisto3, and the font on their signage outside is the same. It’s one of the oldest, most iconic bars in Trastevere, where I grew up.”
Trastevere4 was fertile ground for Antinori — it even provided Bar Leone its name. “Leone is the lion,” Antinori says. “It’s the symbol of the neighbourhood — the actual iconography is the leone, the lion. Sergio Leone is also from Trastevere: I’m a big fan of the spaghetti western movies, and Sergio Leone is my favourite director.”
3. Bar San Calisto is indeed old; it opened in 1969, and today is still well known for its cheap prices, trading from the day through until 2am.
4. The Trastevere neighbourhood is also home to Freni e Frizoni; opening in 2005, it has only relatively recently begun attracting international acclaim, landing on The World’s 50 Best Bars list in 2023.
Football, family, religion.
“If you go into any Italian shop or bar, you will always have religious elements and football elements on the same level. Football, family, religion, always together,” says Antinori. Football plays a key part in the Bar Leone aesthetic.
“The logo with the font that we use, we took a lot of references from 1970s, 1980s football jerseys,” Antinori says. “I am a big AS Roma fan and if you go into any Italian shop or bar, you will always have religious elements and football elements on the same level. Football, family, religion, always together.
“The colours are very straightforward. Those, the orange, the yellow and red, that’s the AS Roma colour palette.”
A logo for all occasions.
“I’m not an expert, but I got very interested in the branding,” Antinori says, and it shows. There’s a number of different expressions of Bar Leone’s logo and iconography, depending on the time, place and occasion.
“There are different ways of showcasing the branding. It could be just a straight logo, and you apply it to anything — like the entrance of the shop, but also for your collateral, your menu, coasters, for any digital prints and whatever.
“But then there is also a more dynamic way of representing the brand, which is with multiple logos,” he says. “For every application that you have, you use a specific logo. For example, our food menu, we have the Bar Leone logo, which is our hero logo with the font. But then we have a series of smaller logos that are connected to the Leone universe. So for the food menu, we have these nice drawings of a leone where the mouth is open.
“When we do guest shifts, we have the leone with a tray of martini glasses. For every application that we have we have a different representation of the leone. They create a universe and it gives texture to the brand, it almost gives you the idea that it’s always in motion, it’s always in movement.”
Simplicity as provocation.
After 12 years working in hotel bars with big budgets, and often ambitious, conceptual drink menus, Antinori wanted to get back to basics.
“I was always excited and passionate about making cocktails and socialising with people,” Antinori says. “I felt that having these big concepts shifted me away for a long time from what I really liked the most.”
In a social media age, with a premium of visually compelling drink and Instagrammable moments, there’s something quite contrarian about simplicity, he says.
“I think for us it was to be a little bit, I would say, provocative. Here in Hong Kong there is a lot of theatre going on. But in the simplicity, there is a lot of complexity.
“We pay a lot of attention to the technicality of making the drinks. So having the right ice, having cold and frozen glassware, working with good quality spirits. The garnishes might be simple, but they are elegant. They are nicely cut.”
“It’s all about the details.”
Antinori might be a details guy, but not all the time.
“I think I’m very disorganised when it comes to my life in general,” he says. “When it comes to the bar and my job, I know what I want. It’s all about details, it’s all about the quality, it’s all about never stopping trying to upgrade or explore new ways to improve.
“We are not here for a short run. We are here for a long run.”
This story appears in Bottled magazine — you can still get a copy of the first issue at bottledmag.com.
