Nina Simone is singing “Love Me or Leave Me,” a cigarette girl in a red-hot dress is snapping photos of swells sipping Gimlets, and the kitchen is sending out Baked Alaskas.

The place: A lively bar just off the lobby of The Breakers. The time: Late 2012.

Hold on there a minute, Mel Torme. A cigarette girl and glasses of Gimlets in 2012?

Indeed, and The Breakers’ toast to classic Palm Beach cocktail culture – its swanky new drinking-and-dining destination, HMF – has been striking a familiar yet fresh chord with 21st century diners, both young and young at heart.

“They have immediately realized exactly what we’re setting out to do,” says Nick Velardo, the resort’s food and beverage director.

Words and phrases like “timeless,” “world-class” and “impeccable service” are associated with The Breakers, Velardo continues. “But ‘cool’? You don’t hear that every day. Now, we’re hearing that every day here.”

HMF, the monogram of Breakers’ founding father Henry Morrison Flagler, opened late last month in the historic resort’s spacious Florentine Room.

The Breakers tapped noted hospitality designer Adam D. Tihany, whose credits include Per Se, Le Cirque 2000 and Restaurant Daniel, to transform the former home of the Tapestry Bar and L’Escalier restaurant into a single space under the room’s high-beamed, handpainted ceiling.

“I kept the architectural shell of the Florentine Room intact and used its grandeur, ornate detailing and extraordinary color palette as a starting point for the design,” Tihany says. “We drew inspiration from this to create customized furnishings and fresh lighting innovations that uplift the space. In the end, the new interiors bring the original architecture to life while the traditional helps take the edge off the new modern persona.”

Thanks to midcentury-inspired furniture, oversized floor lamps and a colorful, harlequin-patterned carpet, the overall mood is delightfully “Mad Men.”

Anchoring the space is a free-standing Wine Wall made of stainless steel and glass. Bigger than a city bus, it holds 3,000 bottles of wine.

An open kitchen, charcoal pizza oven and sushi bar prepare dishes representative of multiple cuisines: Korean short ribs and Wagyu beef sliders. Churrasco steak chimichurri and shrimp pad Thai. Maine lobster mac ‘n’ cheese and Greek-spiced lamb sliders on pita bread. And don’t miss the fresh-prepared potato chips and warm onion dip.

Velardo’s beverage team has tweaked several classic cocktail recipes for modern taste buds. On the menu: the French 75, the Gin Fizz, the Grasshopper and the Railcar #91, an update of the Sidecar, with Courvoisier VSOP, lemon juice, local honey and orange foam.

Providing HMF’s bossanova beat is Kirill Basov, the venue’s stylish music and entertainment director, known for wearing velvet blazers one night, and nerd glasses and bow ties the next. His DJ equipment is hidden behind a bank of plants on a low, circular platform at one end of HMF, which he walks through several times a night to take the pulse of the place’s energy.

The resort spent $6 million on HMF, and most of that was spent rewiring chandeliers and embedding new light fixtures in the ceiling capable of illuminating each table far below.

“This is too significant a room to take any shortcuts, and none were taken,” Velardo says. “This is more than a bar. It’s a major public space in one of the greatest resorts in the world. What would we have spent to renovate the lobby?”