• Luke and Leroy

  21 Seventh Avenue South, 212-645-0004

  Some restaurants cater to smokers: davidburke & donatella, for one, famously parks a limousine out front for patrons who want to light up. But puffing at bars these days too often entails dodging pedestrians during a lonely skulk by the curb. Now comes Luke and Leroy, a two-story lounge that opened in December, to give our much-put-upon smoking drinkers the attention they don’t get elsewhere. In a red-roped six-by-twelve-foot sidewalk smokers’ annex outside, an electric fireplace dances with fake flames, and the mantle offers bowls of marshmallows. When the weather warms up, the bar will scrap this tableau for a new seasonal one: beach chairs around a kiddie pool filled with sand that serves as an ashtray, all under a wide umbrella for those non-beachy nights. See, smokers? Someone does care.

From the 2004 Best of New York issue of New York Magazine