Why you should experience Baobar in Milan, Italy.
Baobar is an inventive cocktail bistrot where Porta Venezia's early-twentieth-century architectural character meets Antonio Irene and David Palma's decade of hospitality, Marco Contarini's thematic mixology and a bar culture developed through travel, nightlife and continual reinvention.
Set along Via Bartolomeo Eustachi near Via Achille Maiocchi and just steps from the Liberty buildings extending toward Corso Buenos Aires, the bistrot occupies an eastern Milan pocket distinguished by floral façades, wrought iron and the residential expansion that reshaped Porta Venezia during the early twentieth century. A major 2025 restyling introduced earth, sand and brick tones across two rooms whose decorative references move between Asian and Anglo-Saxon influences. Soft lighting and dark surfaces compress the scale after sunset, giving the cocktail counter and surrounding tables a more intimate relationship than the long opening hours suggest. The redesign follows an earlier eco-green conception developed around reclaimed furnishings and a Scandinavian moss wall, preserving Baobar's long-standing interest in interior experimentation through a substantially different visual treatment. The result is a Porta Venezia bar whose successive redesigns have kept its physical character moving alongside the drinks program for more than a decade.
What you should know about Baobar.
Baobar is best known for Antonio Irene and David Palma's 2015 takeover of an established Via Bartolomeo Eustachi discobar and their conversion of it into a cocktail-driven bistrot that has subsequently passed through several distinct creative phases. Palma arrived with a background in food distribution and an upbringing in Africa, then combined his interest in food with bartending; Irene brought experience from nightlife operations in Italy and abroad, and both had previously worked at Bond on Milan's Navigli. Their March 2015 reopening replaced the former Latin-American discobar format with an eco-green lounge and recruited London-trained mixologist Manlio Di Blasi, whose early drinks included cocktails served in jars and a substantial family of sours. Two years later Irene and Palma expanded the project through the Atelier, a dedicated room conceived with Milanese craftspeople for private tastings, wine, spirits and cocktail experimentation; the founders themselves directed its design. Riccardo Campagna was behind the counter by 2017, creating drinks such as the whisky-and-Campari Shining and the tequila, habanero and tomato Bloody Sunday. Marco Contarini joined around 2020 after beginning bar work at 17 and eventually became head mixologist, taking responsibility for drink development as well as team leadership. His 2025 South America collection moved through Mexico and indigenous references with tequila, mezcal, cachaça, rum and pisco, supported by collaborations with Ron Barceló and Coach Mezcal. Contarini then began developing an Albero della Vita collection around bark, sap, leaves and fruit, using fermentation, infusions, cordials and kombucha to push the technical program beyond the preceding tropical repertoire. The same year marked a decade under Irene and Palma and brought a complete summer renovation led by Palma, connecting the founders' tenth anniversary with another substantial reinvention of the bar they had taken over in 2015.
Il Tommy del Bao combines Xaman mezcal with Ancho Reyes, Anagavesito, lime and orange bitters, letting smoke and chile warmth develop against fresh acidity. Negroni Zen takes another route through gin, Rabarbaro Zucca, vanilla and Campari before ginger beer and orange bitters stretch the familiar bitter structure into a longer drink. Meeting combines gin and lime with ginger beer, violet cream, rosemary syrup and fresh ginger, moving between floral perfume, herbal sweetness and spice. Dry Paloma No.3 substitutes gin into the grapefruit-and-lime territory associated with the Paloma, adding rosemary and organic pink-grapefruit soda, and Gimlet No.3 reduces the combination to gin and a pink-grapefruit cordial. Fizz No.3 brings green cardamom and ginger beer into the same gin foundation, demonstrating how the bar repeatedly uses herbs, spices, citrus and house preparations to change the direction of a base spirit. Rosemary removes alcohol entirely through lime, rosemary syrup and ginger beer, preserving the acidic-herbal structure found across the broader collection.
How to fold Baobar into your trip.
Baobar works as the evening endpoint for an exploration of the streets east of Porta Venezia through purpose-built cinema architecture, Liberty-era residential construction and the decorative experimentation that accompanied Milan's rapid expansion beyond its former walls.
Begin at Cinema Dumont, constructed between 1908 and 1910 from designs associated with F. Tettamanzi and G. Mainetti as one of Milan's early buildings conceived specifically for motion-picture exhibition. Its low rectangular structure received rich floral decoration and original columns; after the cinema era ended, the hall spent years as a garage before the surviving space entered another public phase as a neighborhood library, preserving an unusually early architectural response to the emergence of film as mass entertainment. Continue to Casa Frisia, designed by Giuseppe Boni and constructed between 1908 and 1909 as a four-story Liberty residence organized around a principal block and two secondary wings enclosing a C-shaped courtyard. Boni divided the street façade into contrasting horizontal registers, then concentrated floral cement ornament around a three-arched French window and paired it with wrought iron carrying natural forms through the entrance gate and balcony, turning a conventional apartment building into an integrated decorative composition. Conclude at Casa Galimberti, constructed between 1902 and 1905 by Giovan Battista Bossi for developer brothers Angelo and Emilio Galimberti during their subdivision of the newly created Via Malpighi. Bossi stretched the principal building across 68 meters of street frontage and worked with the Arcari firm on ironwork and Brambilla e Pinzauti on the extraordinary figurative ceramic surface, joining painted tiles, floral cement and metal decoration across one of Milan's most ambitious Liberty façades. The progression moves from Cinema Dumont's architectural response to a new form of popular entertainment through Boni's integration of floral ornament and wrought iron at Casa Frisia into Bossi and the Galimberti brothers' fusion of development, ceramics and decorative craftsmanship, tracing the architectural experimentation that transformed the streets surrounding Baobar during Milan's early-twentieth-century expansion.
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