There is a specific kind of relief in walking through a door and leaving the decade behind you—especially this decade. Bar Leone, which opened on Broome Street this September, deals in exactly that. It is a restaurant, a nightclub, and a gallery at once, interweaving art, food, and sound into something closer to a getaway than a reservation—a few hours in another country, in another era. And who doesn’t want a bit of escape?

The vision belongs to Andres Diaz, the restaurateur behind Her Name Was Carmen and La Rubia, and who spent the better part of two years building Bar Leone out with New York design studio BOND. What they landed on is a space that works at either end of an evening: a quiet dinner for two, or a night that runs well past the hour you promised yourself.

Upstairs is the slow, but very chic, lane. Conceived as a martini lounge with a mid-century heart, the room takes its cues from the ’60s and early ’70s—soft, flattering light, polished wood, plush textures under your fingertips, the kind of reddish glow that makes everything look like a film still. It doubles as a gallery, too: the walls host a rotating program of exhibitions, refreshed every season or so, with lighting tuned to put the work in focus rather than the crowd.

Take the stairs down and the calendar skips ahead to the late ’70s and early ’80s. The room starts to feel like a Milanese basement club after midnight, the soundtrack given over almost entirely to Italian disco. It is the sort of place that makes you forget you have a morning, or that the Duomo di Milano isn’t just a few blocks away.

“I’ve always been inspired by the golden eras of nightlife, from midcentury Italian glamour to downtown New York in the late ’70s, when a great bar was as much about the music and the people as the drinks,” Diaz says. “Bar Leone is my love letter to those moments, reimagined for the way we go out now.”

“I wanted two rooms that each tell their own story, with one flowing naturally into the next as the evening goes on,” he continues. “Upstairs, you settle into a warm ambiance with a martini and the music lets the conversation carry. Downstairs allows you to let go with Italo disco and a dance floor that fills as the night unfolds. You can stay in one world or move between both, and either way, it feels like Bar Leone.”

The martini, naturally, runs the show—no drink gets more space on the menu. The headliner is the caviar martini: dry or dirty, gin or vodka, topped with Ossetra, for $45. Is a caviar martini necessary? Of course not. But it is nearly fantastical, and we could all use a little more fantasy. For something less extravagant, there’s a golden martini built on two vermouths with a grapefruit edge, a rosy cranberry spin on the Cosmo, and a savory cucumber version that leans herbal and briny.

The kitchen anchors itself around a raw bar—Kumamoto oysters with a yuzu ice, a fluke ceviche brightened with coconut, thinly sliced octopus—before moving on to beef carpaccio, crispy artichokes, zucchini bruschetta, and a dry-aged short rib burger with molten Taleggio ($36). And for nights when restraint is off the table, there’s a caviar bump with a vodka chaser, or the full caviar service at $135.

What Bar Leone understands is that a night out has never really been about what’s on the plate or in the glass. It’s about being somewhere else for a little while. On Broome Street, somewhere else happens to be a Milanese lounge, circa 1974, or if you’ve had enough caviar martinis, a bit like heaven.