The Social Lounge and Tapas

Before it was the Social Lounge, the room at 29 Broadway was called Sazerac. Anthony Cerrato and his partner, Eric Booker, gutted it in February 2015 — a copper ceiling, a run of U-shaped leather booths, a hundred-year-old piano hauled in from Cerrato’s own house, the bar itself cut down to thirteen seats. The roof above it, they left alone.

That’s the part people book. A louvered glass canopy hangs over metal chairs and a wall of exposed brick, string lights threaded through the framing, tables held for dinner the same as anything on the ground floor. Whatever gets ordered up there is cooked next door, at Strada Italiano, the restaurant Cerrato opened on the same block of Broadway in March 2012. It supplies the food for both rooms. A tapas lounge with no kitchen of its own is an odd arrangement, but it leaves the bar’s whole attention on the list.

That list keeps its own logic. The Aztec Old Fashioned works chocolate and orange bitters into bourbon, tipping the classic toward dessert. The Buttercup infuses its own vodka with vanilla, then pulls it through pineapple, cinnamon and rosemary — more herb garden than dessert cart. Dr. Manhattan stretches rye across two vermouths and a shot of amaretto. Polyhymnia piles brandy, bourbon, St. Germain, sweet vermouth and Pernod into one glass. It’s named for a muse, like two others.

Reserve the roof for dinner, and let Strada worry about what’s on the plate.