New Cocktail Lounge Bar Leone Is Chasing the Six Senses in SoHo

New York hospitality veteran Andres Diaz, who launched La Rubia at 11 Howard, found the perfect home for his new concept Bar Leone. The only issue? The SoHo location at 527 Broome Street was already occupied — by his own restaurant, Her Name Was Carmen. “I learned this from big names in the industry like André Balazs and Ian Schrager: They always say, you have to grow up or evolve with your clientele,” says Diaz, who decided to transform the bilevel space of his former Latin American restaurant, which he opened in 2018 when he was in his late 20s, into Bar Leone. “And after a couple of years of great success at Carmen, I was thinking about what’s the next step, what should I do?” His answer was a sophisticated, upscale lounge — and martinis. The upstairs space was redesigned as a “midcentury martini lounge,” built around cozy lighting and a warm ambience, with a design palette rooted in amber and mustard tones. While the 1960s and ’70s informed the upstairs space, downstairs leans toward the ’70s and early ’80s, where the atmosphere is nightlife-driven and the musical focus is Italian disco. “The idea was to highlight two of the most important

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