Why you should experience Dry in Milan, Italy.
Dry is an inventive pizza and cocktail destination where Brera's cultivated evening culture meets Tiziano Vudafieri's industrial interior, a pioneering food-and-mixology format and two distinct rooms designed around drinking and Neapolitan pizza.
Set along Via Solferino near Via Castelfidardo and just steps from the galleries and historic palaces of Via Brera, the restaurant occupies a street whose publishing, design and hospitality culture extends the district's artistic character north toward Porta Nuova. Vudafieri-Saverino Partners divided the original 2013 project into a cocktail bar at the entrance and a deeper pizzeria, retaining rough industrial surfaces beneath deliberately simple furnishings. Low illumination, wood, metal and a prominent bar create a darker first room organized around bottles, glassware and bartending equipment. The rear dining area shifts attention toward pizza without severing the visual relationship with the bar, preserving the two-part composition that distinguished the original project. The result is a Brera restaurant whose architecture makes cocktails and pizza equal protagonists before either reaches the table.
What you should know about Dry.
Dry is best known for introducing its pizza-and-cocktail concept to Milan in 2013 through a founding group that combined chef Andrea Berton, sommelier and lawyer Diego Rigatti, architect Tiziano Vudafieri and project director Giovanni Fiorin. The idea grew from the same food.different group behind nearby Pisacco, yet Dry pursued an unusual pairing that placed a pizzeria and serious cocktail operation under one roof; an unfinished space even opened through a secondary entrance during that year's Fuorisalone before the project settled into regular service. Berton supplied MICHELIN-level culinary experience during the formative period, Vudafieri translated the concept into its two-room design and the group expanded Dry with a second Milan operation in 2017. Lorenzo Sirabella transformed its pizza program after arriving in 2018, bringing an Ischian upbringing, early bakery experience and training under Enzo Coccia, whose O'Sfizio d'a Notizia had entrusted him with its pizzeria department in 2016. Sirabella's first year at Dry coincided with his victory in the northern selection of Emergente Pizza Chef through a creation inspired by cassoeula, beginning a run of national recognition that placed the restaurant eighth in 50 Top Pizza Italia and fifteenth worldwide in 2023. His Margherita Provola Affumicata & Pepe Nero di Sarawak earned 50 Top Pizza's Pizza dell'Anno award in 2024 as Dry rose to seventh in Italy. The restaurant retained seventh place nationally in 2025, reached fifteenth in 50 Top Pizza World and earned the organization's Best Cocktail List award under bar manager Edris Al Malat, bringing the two disciplines conceived by the founders twelve years earlier into the same international recognition cycle.
Sirabella's Margherita Provola Affumicata & Pepe Nero di Sarawak concentrates the pizza program into tomato, smoked provola and the aromatic heat of Sarawak pepper, using a combination strong enough to become his 2024 award-winning creation. Neapolitan pizzas enter a wood-fired oven around 450°C for one minute, producing rapid expansion and charring before toppings complete the dough. Pan focaccia follows another route at 360°C in an electric oven, creating a thicker structure suited to combinations such as veal cooked at low temperature with tuna sauce, Maldon salt and caper powder. Steamed focaccia changes the technique again through fifteen minutes at 100°C before a final passage through the electric oven establishes an exterior crust. Edris Al Malat's drinks supply the liquid counterpart through classics and house creations, with the Dry Penicillin combining bourbon, ginger syrup, lemon and Laphroaig 10 for smoke, citrus and spice. Piennolo tomatoes, smoked cheese, pepper, slow-cooked meat and Scotch smoke demonstrate how the restaurant develops pairings through contrasts in temperature, acidity, fat, fermentation and aromatic intensity.
How to fold Dry into your trip.
Dry works as the evening endpoint for an afternoon through Brera that follows the district's transformation from aristocratic power into an institutional center for art and finally a permanent home for Milan's twentieth-century collections.
Begin at Palazzo Cusani, whose seventeenth-century origins lie with Agostino Cusani and whose later expansion gave the family residence two major architectural interventions across successive generations. Gerolamo Cusani commissioned Giovanni Ruggeri to create the elaborate Via Brera façade between 1712 and 1719; Ferdinando Cusani then entrusted Giuseppe Piermarini with the garden front between 1775 and 1779, placing Lombard Baroque and Neoclassical architecture within the development of a single aristocratic complex. Continue to Palazzo Brera, where Francesco Maria Richini began transforming the former Umiliati monastery for the Jesuits during the seventeenth century before suppression of the order in 1773 transferred the complex to the state. Maria Theresa of Austria concentrated the Accademia di Belle Arti, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, astronomical observatory and botanical garden there, with Piermarini completing the courtyard and Via Brera entrance as the former religious complex became one of Milan's principal intellectual institutions. Conclude at Palazzo Citterio, an eighteenth-century residence acquired by the state in 1972 after Pinacoteca director Franco Russoli conceived Grande Brera as an expansion capable of accommodating modern art beyond the historic palace. Decades of unrealized interventions included work associated with James Stirling before Mario Cucinella Architects completed the latest architectural phase; the palace opened publicly in December 2024 with more than 200 works from the Jesi and Vitali collections, including Boccioni, Carrà, Morandi, Modigliani, Picasso and Braque. The progression moves from the Cusani family's architectural patronage through Maria Theresa's concentration of cultural institutions inside Palazzo Brera into Franco Russoli's half-century project to extend those institutions through Palazzo Citterio, tracing the mechanisms that turned Brera from an aristocratic quarter into one of Milan's densest centers of art and design.
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