THE WORLD'S BEST BAR WILL REMIND YOU OF YOUR GRANDMOTHER'S LIVING ROOM, AND THAT'S EXACTLY THE POINT

The walk up to Bar Leone tests your stamina.

- BEA TRINIDAD

Halfway up the hill, you'll feel it in your calves and wonder if you should have picked somewhere easier to reach. Hong Kong's hills have a way of looking deceptively close until you're already climbing.

But when you step inside, you understand why people make this trek two or three times a week, why girlfriends become regulars and bring their partners along or why queues form before the doors even open. The mortadella sandwiches and cocktails are worth the climb, but it's more than that.

On Oct. 8, at Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Cruise Terminal, Bar Leone was crowned The World’s Best Bar for 2025. This marks the first time an Asia-based bar has claimed the top spot in the awards’ 17-year history. It’s a two-year-old bar with mismatched furniture and posters pulled from founder Lorenzo Antinori’s childhood memories in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood.

Bar Leone doesn’t just look like the world’s best bar. It looks like a Roman living room from the 1980s, because that’s what it is.

The design comes from Studio TK, drawing heavily on Antinori’s memories of Trastevere in the ‘80s and ‘90s, with aged plastered walls, wood panelling and warm lighting. Vintage Italian pop culture posters share space with AS Roma memorabilia and ‘80s movie posters, the kind that reject cocktail culture’s more pretentious tendencies. Outside, the terracotta paint job mimics the bars of Trastevere. If it weren’t for the queue, you'd walk right past it.

“Our idea was really to try to be as much as possible a neighborhood bar,” Antinori explains. “Create an experience that is curated. It’s a quality bar experience, but at the same time, very approachable, very accessible.”