Why you should experience drinc in Milan, Italy.
drinc is an intimate cocktail bar where Porta Venezia's concentration of early-twentieth-century design meets Luca Marcellin and Desiree Brunet's luxury-hotel backgrounds, personalized bartending and a tiny neo-eclectic room created around close contact between bartender and drinker.
Set along Via Francesco Hayez near Via Giuseppe Sirtori and just steps from Corso Buenos Aires, the bar occupies a quieter Porta Venezia pocket surrounded by the floral façades, sculpted cement and wrought iron that made this district a center of Milanese Liberty architecture. Brandless developed the 40-square-meter interior from Marcellin and Brunet's interest in the optimism of the swing era, translating that reference through velvet armchairs, rugs, tropical accents and a compact pink room. Only six of the original 18 seats faced the bar, where two workstations and a counter built with bottles, preparation surface and guest seating at a common height exposed the bartenders' movements at exceptionally close range. A black streetfront gives little indication of the interior, preserving the deliberate discovery associated with the founders' reinterpretation of a secret bar. The result is a Porta Venezia cocktail room whose small dimensions turn bartending into a close-range performance framed by neo-eclectic design.
What you should know about drinc.
drinc is best known for Luca Marcellin and Desiree Brunet's translation of careers in international luxury hotels into a highly personalized Milanese cocktail-bar project. Marcellin spent more than two decades behind bars that included Pragelato Resort, Castillo Hotel Son Vida in Mallorca, Grand Hôtel du Lac in Vevey, Il Pellicano in Porto Ercole, The Jefferson in Washington, D.C. and five years at Four Seasons Hotel Milano, giving him a service background that directly preceded his decision to become an independent operator. His competitive career added another layer: he finished runner-up globally in the Domaine de Canton competition, won the Nino Cedrini Competition and reached finals in World Class Italy, Nikka competitions, Bacardi Legacy Europe and the global Roses Cocktail Tazza. Teaching appointments at Campari Academy and the European Business School subsequently moved that expertise into bartender education, and Campari Academy later selected him as a mentor during its ninth Bartender Competition. Marcellin opened drinc. Cocktail & Conversation in 2016, pairing hotel-style hospitality with the familiarity of a neighborhood American bar. Brunet, herself experienced in luxury hospitality and management, became his partner in the next venture, and the pair spent four months developing drinc.different before opening it in August 2019. The Hayez bar distilled the first operation into a boutique-bar concept modeled conceptually on small luxury hotels, placing a very limited number of seats under unusually attentive service. Their work later expanded into drinc.lab and a consulting operation devoted to bartender training, concept creation and hospitality projects, turning the two bars into the public-facing components of a broader professional practice.
AUS Negroni starts with gin infused with grapefruit peel, then combines an infusion of Artemisia absinthium and jasmine with Campari and red vermouth to push the familiar Italian structure toward pronounced bitterness and citrus. Paro-Santo takes another classic form in a different direction through palo santo brandy, house sake-based vermouth and black sesame oil, producing smoke, herbal freshness and roasted depth from only a few components. Musa Silibba infuses Highland Park 12 with carob before clear banana juice and soy sauce bring fruit and salinity into the whisky base. Sakura moves toward Japan through Roku gin, umeboshi sake, raspberry and citric acid, balancing fruit against a distinctly saline finish. Earlier drink development established the technical premise behind these combinations: Marcellin favored tightly edited constructions and used Hoshizaki equipment for working ice before serving finished cocktails with exceptionally clear ice in Nude glassware. The current list extends that approach through house infusions, distillates, cordials, shrubs and acidified fruit, allowing unusual ingredients such as mustard, curry, lovage, cornflower, tonka bean and candied cucumber to alter recognizable cocktail structures.
How to fold drinc into your trip.
drinc works as the evening endpoint for a walk through Porta Venezia that follows Milanese Liberty from an architect's experimental private residence through an industrial patron's architectural provocation to a building where sculpture became the defining feature of the entrance.
Begin at Casa Campanini, designed by Alfredo Campanini as his own residence and constructed between 1903 and 1906 after the architect had studied at Brera and begun establishing himself through public and religious commissions. Michele Vedani created the concrete female figures flanking the entrance, and Alessandro Mazzucotelli executed Campanini's floral wrought-iron gate; polychrome glass, frescoes and original decorative work carried the architectural project inward, making the house a concentrated experiment in the techniques Campanini developed during Milan's Liberty period. Continue to Palazzo Castiglioni, commissioned in 1900 by industrialist Ermenegildo Castiglioni from Giuseppe Sommaruga and completed in the opening years of the new century on aristocratic Corso Venezia. Sommaruga used rough stone, sculptural ornament and elaborate ironwork to announce a new architectural language, and Ernesto Bazzaro's two nude portal figures caused such public controversy that they were removed, leaving the building with the Milanese nickname “Cà di ciapp” and establishing it as an early flashpoint in the city's embrace of Liberty. Conclude at Villa Invernizzi, developed during the twentieth century around the residence associated with industrialist Romeo Invernizzi, whose dairy enterprise became inseparable from products such as Mio cheese and Invernizzi butter. The garden later became famous for its colony of pink flamingos, introducing an unexpected living presence behind the district's formal façades and creating one of Porta Venezia's most distinctive private-garden traditions. The progression moves from Campanini's fusion of architecture, sculpture and wrought iron through Sommaruga's fascinating challenge to Corso Venezia's established architecture into the Invernizzi residence and its extraordinary garden, tracing three highly individual forms of private patronage around drinc.
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