Why you should experience Loste Café in Milan, Italy.
Loste Café is a cosmopolitan bakery-café where Risorgimento's residential calm, Stefano Ferraro and Lorenzo Cioli's Copenhagen years, Scandinavian-inflected pastry and specialty coffee converge through one of the addresses that helped redraw Milan's contemporary breakfast culture.
Set along Via Francesco Guicciardini near Via Macedonio Melloni and just steps from Piazza Risorgimento, the bakery-café occupies Risorgimento within a quieter eastern pocket of Central Milan, where early twentieth-century residential architecture and tree-lined streets temper the pace of the commercial center farther west. Architect Giulio Marchesi organized the original room around oak, matte black surfaces and a sharp yellow accent selected by Ferraro, with custom furniture produced alongside local craftspeople and the pastry workshop remaining visibly connected to the front counter. The restrained setting keeps attention on the daily rhythm of laminated dough emerging from the kitchen, coffee passing through the bar and customers moving between breakfast pastries and later savory preparations. The result is a compact Milan café whose international character comes through the accumulated experience of its founders and the precision with which pastry, coffee and contemporary design meet inside an intentionally uncomplicated room.
What you should know about Loste Café.
Loste Café is best known for Stefano Ferraro and Lorenzo Cioli turning careers developed across some of the world's most ambitious restaurants into an independent Milan café whose name combines the opening letters of Lorenzo and Stefano. Ferraro, born in Turin in 1986, initially studied economics before leaving for London in his twenties, where his earliest kitchen work included frying potatoes. His career subsequently carried him through England, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Dubai, Mexico and Sydney, with periods alongside Gordon Ramsay, Joël Robuchon and Jason Atherton preceding his arrival at Noma in Copenhagen in 2016. René Redzepi promoted Ferraro to head pastry chef after six months and brought him into Noma's small Test Kitchen development group, placing pastry creation inside the experimental work of a restaurant that profoundly shaped twenty-first-century Nordic cooking. Cioli followed a different route. Originally from Borgo a Buggiano in Tuscany, he developed as a sommelier through restaurants including Nuno Mendes's Viajante, The Arts Club and The Square in London before working in Vancouver and Copenhagen. His encounter with Norwegian coffee specialist Tim Wendelboe shifted part of that wine-trained palate toward specialty coffee, creating the second discipline that would eventually define Loste alongside Ferraro's pastry. Ferraro and Cioli met during their Copenhagen years, then committed their savings to an independent project originally conceived there as a restaurant two years before its Milan debut. Covid changed the scale of that ambition. They returned to Italy and opened the smaller Loste Café on February 25, 2021, with Ferraro leaving Noma only two months earlier after five years in Copenhagen. Architect Giulio Marchesi developed the Guicciardini interior, including the central bar, solid-oak tables and custom pieces produced with Milanese artisans. The founders expanded to Via Varesina in the Certosa District in 2023, again working with Marchesi, joined there by Andrea Masperi. Loste subsequently grew from its original two founders to a team of twenty and earned Tre Chicchi and Tre Tazzine, the highest distinction in Gambero Rosso's Bar d'Italia 2025. A project born from two itinerant restaurant careers during the most difficult period for hospitality in recent memory had become, within four years, a multi-address Milan business carrying Ferraro's Noma pastry discipline and Cioli's sommelier-trained approach to coffee into the Italian bar format.
Laminated dough provides the clearest route through Loste's daily experience, beginning with croissants and pain au chocolat before cinnamon, cardamom and savory fillings pull the same pastry discipline in markedly different directions. The cinnamon roll develops softness and caramelized spice through tightly wound layers, and cardamom introduces a brighter aromatic register that connects the pastry counter with the founders' Copenhagen years. Ferraro pushes laminated dough further through the cruffin, where the taller form produces crisp outer ridges around a softer interior, and savory versions have paired that architecture with ingredients such as finocchiona and fennel seed. Focaccia changes the texture completely, with the inherited wood-fired oven supporting bread preparations that have included combinations such as taleggio and kimchi. Coffee provides the continuous counterpoint. Loste began with lightly roasted 100 percent Arabica Costa Rican coffee from Volcan Azul roasted in Copenhagen by April Coffee, serving espresso alongside cortado, cappuccino, flat white and filter preparations that expose different levels of acidity, body and aromatic clarity. Cioli's wine background extends the same attention to drinks later in the day, connecting specialty coffee with bottles selected from smaller producers instead of treating breakfast as an isolated service period. Pastry, bread, coffee and wine consequently develop from separate strands of Ferraro and Cioli's careers into a café experience whose range remains anchored by precise production and an unusually strong relationship between what is baked and what fills the cup.
How to fold Loste Café into your trip.
Loste Café works as the breakfast anchor for a Risorgimento itinerary connecting Alfredo Campanini's personal experiment in Milanese Liberty, Giuseppe Grandi's thirteen-year sculptural undertaking for the uprising of 1848 and Piero Portaluppi's architecture for an industrial family entering the social world of interwar Milan.
Begin at Casa Campanini, built between 1904 and 1906 as architect Alfredo Campanini's own residence and professional showcase after the success of Giuseppe Sommaruga's Palazzo Castiglioni helped push Milanese Liberty toward increasingly ambitious decorative experimentation. Campanini designed details extending from polychrome glass to vegetal ironwork, Alessandro Mazzucotelli executed the wrought iron, and Michele Vedani created the two immense female figures representing Painting and Sculpture that frame the entrance. Continue to Cinque Giornate di Milano, commissioned after a competition won by Giuseppe Grandi in 1881 to commemorate Milan's March 1848 revolt against Austrian rule. Grandi spent thirteen years developing the work, using five female figures for the five days and keeping live animals, including an eagle and an African lion named Bolco, as models for its sculptural program; he died in 1894 before the completed monument was inaugurated on March 18, 1895, when the remains of the uprising's dead were transferred into its crypt. Conclude at Villa Necchi Campiglio, designed by Piero Portaluppi between 1932 and 1935 for sisters Nedda and Gigina Necchi and Gigina's husband, Angelo Campiglio, members of the Lombard industrial bourgeoisie. Portaluppi controlled the architecture and decorative detail with unusual completeness before Tomaso Buzzi later altered parts of the interiors, leaving two major Milanese designers layered across a house that subsequently entered the FAI. The progression moves from Campanini using his own residence to test the expressive possibilities of Milanese Liberty through Grandi devoting thirteen years to sculpting the memory of civic revolt into Portaluppi translating industrial wealth into interwar architecture, tracing three sharply different expressions of Milanese authorship around Loste's eastern-center neighborhood.
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