The Social Lounge and Tapas

Three earlier restaurants didn’t last long in the space — Tingles Cafe, Zoe Rose, Never Blue — before Anthony Cerrato and his family opened Social Lounge and its sister restaurant, Strada Italiano, side by side at 29 Broadway in March 2012. The two have shared the block for more than a decade now, still run by the Cerrato family — Gabriel, Jennie and Carly Wilson among them — with a back bar stacked floor to ceiling with bottles. Most of what people notice first is the rooftop: a patio under a louvered glass canopy, metal chairs against a wall of exposed brick, string lights woven through the framing, open enough at golden hour to watch downtown from above. Every seat up there is reservable for dinner now, same as the dining room below. The bar runs eleven house cocktails on its own list, from the Aztec Old Fashioned — bourbon, chocolate and orange bitters, simple syrup — to the Buttercup, a vanilla-infused vodka sour built with pineapple, cinnamon and rosemary, to the Dr. Manhattan, rye stretched with amaretto and two vermouths, or the Polyhymnia, which layers brandy, bourbon, St. Germain, sweet vermouth and Pernod into one glass — ten to fourteen dollars across the list. Ask for food, though, and you get Strada’s menu, not a kitchen of Social Lounge’s own — the two restaurants are that close. The two keep the same calendar as well as the same kitchen: when one of them is closed, so is the other. Reserve ahead for the rooftop if the golden-hour view over downtown is the point; the canopy seats are the first ones to fill.