Why you should experience Mandarin Garden in Milan, Italy.
Mandarin Garden is a cultivated cocktail garden where Brera's design culture, Milanese aperitivo tradition, Guglielmo Miriello's international bartending career and Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel's architectural authorship converge inside a secluded eighteenth-century courtyard shaped equally by tropical planting and contemporary Italian hospitality.
Set along Via Andegari near Via Monte di Pietà and just steps from Museo Poldi Pezzoli, the cocktail bar occupies Brera within the intimate internal world of Mandarin Oriental, Milan, where the surrounding stone streets give way to black-and-white marble, tropical planting and the open air of a courtyard concealed behind the historic façades. Antonio Citterio's brightly upholstered seating settles among sculptural plants, climbing greenery and overhanging branches developed by landscape studio P'arcnouveau, allowing the garden to read as a composed extension of the original interiors. Evening changes the emphasis toward the bar, where contemporary music, low illumination and the movement between interior counter and planted courtyard establish a natural setting for aperitivo to continue into late drinks. The result is a deeply Milanese hotel bar whose strongest qualities emerge through the relationship between authored design, garden architecture and a cocktail program led by one of the city's most accomplished bartenders.
What you should know about Mandarin Garden.
Mandarin Garden is best known for Guglielmo Miriello's transformation of Mandarin Oriental's original bar and bistrot into a cocktail destination that joined his international bartending career with a major 2022 redesign of the hotel's courtyard. Born in Crispiano in 1980, Miriello entered hotel school intending to become a chef before discovering bartending through early work with Marco Sumerano at Glass in Legnano. Milan became his professional base, with periods at Bulgari Hotel and Excelsior preceding a move to Shanghai, where he directed Sugar Bar at the Pourcel brothers' MICHELIN-starred Maison Pourcel. Competition brought another measure of his development: Miriello reached the top ten of the Innovative Drink of the Year contest in New York in 2010, won Italy's Diageo World Class competition in 2011 and represented the country at the global final in New Delhi. He returned to Milan in 2013 to direct the opening of Dry Milano, spent four years developing its combination of cocktails and gourmet pizza, then moved to Ceresio7 as bar manager. Mandarin Oriental appointed him director of Mandarin Bar & Bistrot in November 2021, placing the entire bar and food operation under his direction alongside executive chef Antonio Guida. A larger transformation followed in 2022. The former Mandarin Bar & Bistrot became Mandarin Garden, retaining the black-and-white polychrome marble and original Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel scheme from the hotel's 2015 debut before P'arcnouveau introduced sculptural planting, climbing vegetation and branches throughout the courtyard. Miriello marked the new chapter with an eleven-drink collection inspired by Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, matching its eleven signatures to the eleven blades of the Mandarin Oriental fan and following Phileas Fogg and Passepartout across the novel's destinations. Gaetano Ascone subsequently became bar manager after a career that took him from Calabria to London, including InterContinental Park Lane and Claridge's. Mandarin Garden won Bargiornale's Hotel Bar of the Year at the 2024 Barawards, converting the architectural and mixological reinvention begun three years earlier into national recognition. Miriello and Ascone commemorated Mandarin Oriental Milan's tenth anniversary in 2025 with 10, combining Tanqueray Ten, arrack and Venturo in a drink conceived around Milanese aperitivo.
The current Estate Italiana collection turns Miriello and Ascone's attention toward four Italian summer destinations, giving the garden a compact sequence built around Liguria, the Amalfi Coast, Tuscany and Sicily through three alcoholic drinks and one alcohol-free composition. Mediterraneo opens from a Ligurian direction through gin, basil and saline accents, establishing aromatic herbs and coastal freshness as the first register. Amalfi develops the sequence through lemon, pushing citrus toward the brighter acidity associated with the southern coast. Tuscan inspiration shifts toward fig leaf, bringing a greener and deeper aromatic profile into the progression before Sicily supplies the final geographical movement through ingredients associated with the island's heat and fruit. Earlier signatures show how this approach has developed under Miriello: Spring Punch combined Tanqueray Ten with pink-grapefruit-and-basil shrub, pomelo tonic and pink pepper before arriving in Swarovski x Rosenthal Signum porcelain, joining the drink itself to contemporary Italian table design. CaraLina pushed that collaboration into Fornasetti through Campari, mezcal, Ancho Reyes, Cocchi Barolo Chinato and chocolate bitters, finishing with smoke and a chocolate disc above a Tema e Variazioni glass bearing Lina Cavalieri's face. Antonio Guida's Italian and Milanese cooking gives aperitivo a parallel culinary route, with pastry chef Marco Pinna extending the sequence into desserts such as Oriental, composed from mango and passion-fruit chantilly, vanilla and tonka cream, hazelnut sponge and sesame streusel. Cocktails consequently move through Mandarin Garden as authored compositions tied to geography, art and design, giving the planted courtyard a drinking program with the same deliberate creative direction as its architecture.
How to fold Mandarin Garden into your trip.
Mandarin Garden works as the evening anchor for a Brera itinerary connecting a nineteenth-century collector's private house, Milan's struggle to secure an international theatrical collection and the operatic institution that gave that collection its cultural home.
Begin at Museo Poldi Pezzoli, created by Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli after he inherited his family fortune in 1846 and began assembling arms, Renaissance painting and decorative arts inside his Milan residence. His support for the 1848 insurrection led to exile in Lugano, followed by travel through France and England that exposed him to new approaches to collecting; after returning to Milan, he commissioned Giuseppe Balzaretto, Giuseppe Bertini and Luigi Scrosati to transform his rooms into historical environments for the growing collection. Continue to Museo Teatrale alla Scala, whose founding turned into an international contest after antiquarian Jules Sambon offered his theatrical collection in Paris in 1911 for 450,000 lire. Arrigo Boito, Lodovico Pogliaghi and Brera director Ettore Modigliani joined the Milanese effort, fifty citizens helped raise the purchase price, and J. P. Morgan emerged as a rival buyer before withdrawing; the collection subsequently became the nucleus of the museum that opened in 1913. Conclude at Teatro alla Scala, the institution whose international stature gave that campaign its leverage and whose artistic history supplied the larger world surrounding the museum's objects. Giuseppe Piermarini designed the theater for Empress Maria Theresa after fire destroyed the Teatro Regio Ducale in 1776, and La Scala opened in 1778 before becoming inseparable from figures including Gioachino Rossini, Giuseppe Verdi, Arturo Toscanini and Maria Callas. The progression moves from Poldi Pezzoli turning private collecting into a public inheritance through Boito, Pogliaghi and Modigliani defeating Morgan for Sambon's theatrical collection into Piermarini's opera house and the artists who made Milan a global capital of performance.
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