Why you should experience drinc.different in Milan, Italy.
drinc.different is an intimate cocktail bar where Porta Venezia's decorative exuberance meets Luca Marcellin and Desiree Brunet's luxury-hotel discipline, swing-inspired design and a tightly controlled approach to modern mixology.
Set along Via Francesco Hayez near Via Giuseppe Sirtori and just steps from the Liberty architecture concentrated around Via Marcello Malpighi, the bar occupies a residential pocket shaped by some of Milan's richest early-twentieth-century decorative experimentation. Brandless translated the optimism of the swing era into a 40-square-meter interior of curving forms, metallic finishes, saturated surfaces and velvet seating. Eighteen seats divide between six positions at the counter and twelve around low tables, giving the bartenders direct visual contact with almost the entire room. The counter places its work surface, bottles and guest-facing edge on a common level, exposing preparation across two stations and turning technical execution into part of the evening. The result is a Porta Venezia bar whose miniature scale concentrates color, movement and close-range bartending into a deliberately personal night out.
What you should know about drinc.different.
drinc.different is best known for Luca Marcellin and Desiree Brunet's conversion of careers in international luxury hospitality into an 18-seat boutique-bar concept opened in August 2019. Marcellin, born in 1982 and raised around Sestriere, trained at hotel school and earned an AIBES diploma before building a fourteen-year career through properties including Pragelato Resort, Castillo Hotel Son Vida in Mallorca, Grand Hôtel du Lac in Vevey, Il Pellicano in Porto Ercole, The Jefferson in Washington, Four Seasons Casablanca and five years at Four Seasons Milano. His departure from hotel operations produced drinc. Cocktail & Conversation on Via Plinio in July 2016, with the spelling substituting a “c” for the conventional “k” to emphasize Italian provenance and the final “inc” referencing incorporation. Brunet brought a parallel twenty-year hospitality career encompassing Guest Relations management at luxury resorts in Zanzibar, Kenya, the Maldives, Morocco, Taiwan, Greece and Cambodia before reaching Resident Manager level for a luxury five-star hotel group in Milan. The pair met in 2017 and developed drinc.different as their second project, completing the new bar within four months and drawing its service model from the personalized attention of small luxury hotels. Senior bartender Simone Rancati and junior bartender Alessandro Buggini developed its separate drinks direction, initially structured around seventeen signatures, five gin and tonics, five vermouth and tonics, quarterly specials and a changing monthly cocktail. Gambero Rosso subsequently awarded drinc.different its Premio Foglia in its cocktail-bar selection, extending the founders' hotel-derived approach into formal recognition within Italian drinks culture. Their activity later expanded through drinc.lab and consulting work covering recipe development, bartender training, concept creation and hospitality projects beyond the two Milan bars.
Bolethus combines Espolòn Blanco tequila and mezcal with an umami preparation, porcini and celery bitters, carrying earthy mushroom depth through agave spirits and smoke. Tzatzikini moves in another direction through Bickens gin, Chazalettes dry vermouth, green Chartreuse, brine and a tzatziki element, placing herbal distillates against salinity and cooling dairy notes. Mastichios connects mastiha, Campari, fig, beetroot and mezcal, producing a darker bitter profile with fruit and smoke threaded through the composition. The current Au S Negroni infuses grapefruit peel into gin and combines it with wormwood, jasmine, Campari and red vermouth, preserving the bitter structure of its classical reference through additional citrus and botanical layers. Paro-Santo uses palo-santo-infused brandy, house vermouth based on sake and black-sesame oil, shifting the Manhattan format toward wood smoke, rice wine and roasted seed. Clear working ice produced with Hoshizaki equipment and highly transparent serving ice reinforce Marcellin's preference for visually clean drinks, with Nude glassware keeping the finished liquid unobstructed at the table.
How to fold drinc.different into your trip.
drinc.different works as the evening endpoint for an architectural route through Porta Venezia that follows Milan from the ceramic and ironwork experiments of the Liberty period into the eclecticism preceding the First World War and the severe domestic modernity of the 1930s.
Begin at Casa Galimberti, commissioned by brothers Angelo and Emilio Galimberti from Giovanni Battista Bossi and constructed between 1903 and 1905 on land formerly occupied by the Società Anonima degli Omnibus, operator of Milan's horse-drawn public transport. Bossi covered more than 170 square meters of its exterior with fire-painted ceramic tiles executed by Pio Pinzauti and Ferdinando Brambilla, then integrated wrought iron and floral cement decoration into a residential building equipped with centralized heating and an elevator. Continue to Palazzo Berri Meregalli, constructed between 1911 and 1913 by Giulio Ulisse Arata for the Berri Meregalli family, where exposed brick, stone arches and Gothic references collide with mosaics, floral ironwork and sculpture. Angiolo D'Andrea and Pietro Adamo Rimoldi contributed pictorial decoration, Attilio Prendoni and the Callegari worked on sculpture, and Adolfo Wildt added the gilded marble Vittoria Alata in 1919 to commemorate the end of the First World War. Conclude at Villa Necchi Campiglio, designed by Piero Portaluppi between 1932 and 1935 for industrialist Angelo Campiglio and sisters Gigina and Nedda Necchi on former garden land opened for development during the early twentieth century. Portaluppi controlled the architecture and interior detailing of the residence, which later received important twentieth-century art holdings including the Claudia Gian Ferrari, Guido Sforni and Alighiero and Emilietta de' Micheli collections before the house entered FAI stewardship. The progression moves from Bossi's union of ceramic art and technologically modern housing through Arata's collision of historical forms with contemporary decorative craft into Portaluppi's disciplined 1930s residence, compressing three successive stages of Milanese design into the streets surrounding drinc.different.
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