Why you should experience Mulligans Irish Pub & Whisky Bar in Milan, Italy.
Mulligans Irish Pub & Whisky Bar is a storied neighborhood pub where Ghisolfa's working-class roots, the Bertoni family's Bergamasque hospitality, a former bocce club and one of Milan's deepest whisky cultures converge inside a business shaped by the same family for nearly six decades.
Set along Via Giuseppe Govone near Via Principe Eugenio and just steps from Villa Simonetta, the wood-lined pub occupies Ghisolfa between the old industrial territories of Bovisa and the neighborhoods extending north from Corso Sempione, far from Milan's concentrated nightlife corridors. Dark timber, brewery mirrors, framed memorabilia and a substantial bar reproduce the visual language Beppe and Alviero Bertoni encountered during the Irish journey that changed their family business, with the furnishings themselves constructed in Dublin before installation in Milan. A downstairs room extends the pub into whisky territory, concentrating bottles accumulated across decades and supporting tastings devoted to distilleries, individual casks and historic releases. The result is a deeply personal drinking institution whose Irish appearance grew from a Bergamasque family trattoria and whose whisky culture became serious enough to draw distillers, collectors and specialist tastings to Via Govone.
What you should know about Mulligans Irish Pub & Whisky Bar.
Mulligans Irish Pub & Whisky Bar is best known for the journey of the Bertoni family, beginning when Tarcisio and Anna Bertoni packed their children into a heavily loaded Bianchina and left Villa d'Ogna in the Upper Seriana Valley for Milan in 1967. The couple had run the bar at Villa d'Ogna railway station before discovering an available license on Via Govone, where they established Trattoria con gioco delle bocce Porta Bella around an existing bocce culture and served Lombard cooking such as fried frogs, salamella and polenta with braised meat. Tarcisio bought wine by the truckload in Nizza Monferrato and spent days bottling it, giving his son Beppe an early education in bottles as the boy helped arrange them after his father's work. Retirement eventually removed Tarcisio and Anna from daily operation, leaving Beppe, Alviero and their sister Odette to confront a Milan where traditional osterias were disappearing. Odette retained command of the kitchen as the siblings briefly recast the business as the more formal La Candela, yet Beppe and Alviero found the decisive idea in an article about pubs published by Bargiornale. The brothers traveled to Ireland, became captivated by pub culture and commissioned an Irish interior in Dublin for shipment and reconstruction on Via Govone, converting the former bocce club into Mulligans. Whisky became their chosen point of distinction after Franco Gasparri, later a Diageo Master Ambassador, introduced them to the Classic Malts selection and connoisseur Giorgio D'Ambrosio became an important guide to their developing collection. Beppe and Alviero purchased a Bushmills Millennium cask five years before its 2000 release, becoming the sole Italian recipients of the 25-year-old bottling created for the millennium and placing their barrel in the distillery alongside casks bearing names including Sean Connery and Liza Minnelli. Mulligans later became an Ardbeg Embassy, with Islay whisky assuming a prominent position within a collection extending far beyond Ireland into Scotland, Japan and the United States. Whisky culture on Via Govone grew into an international network: distiller Jim McEwan, independent bottler Stewart Laing and collector Emmanuel Dron have passed through the pub, and the jury selecting the Milano Whisky Festival's annual winners has assembled there. Davide Romano of Valinch & Mallet presented Mulligans with a large Scottish quaich, used communally for prized old malts, and the Bertonis marked their first half-century with three dedicated bottlings named after bocce culture: Il puntista, a 10-year Craigellachie, Il bocciatore, a 15-year Bowmore, and La squadra, a 15-year Caol Ila. Milan later admitted Mulligans to its Botteghe Storiche, preserving the Bertonis' progression from station-bar family to trattoria keepers, Irish-pub builders and specialist whisky custodians within the same Via Govone business.
Whisky now provides the clearest route through the bar, with the selection moving geographically across Scotland's Lowlands, Highlands, Speyside, Campbeltown and Islay before extending into Irish, Japanese and American distilling traditions. Ardbeg holds special prominence through Mulligans' Embassy status, giving the intensely peated Islay distillery a dedicated role among the bottles accumulated by the Bertoni brothers. Historic expressions deepen that drinking culture, including rare blends from the 1960s and specialist bottles kept in the downstairs collection used for guided tasting evenings. The kitchen maintains a separate lineage from the whisky program through Odette Bertoni's long stewardship and the family's refusal to abandon cooking during the transition from La Candela into an Irish pub. Shepherd's pie and beef cooked with Guinness bring familiar pub forms into the menu, with haggis appearing on selected occasions and preserving a stronger British and Irish connection. Milanese roots remain equally present through dishes inherited from the family's earlier trattoria years, preventing the transformation into Mulligans from erasing the Bertonis' original culinary history. The bar and kitchen consequently preserve two family journeys side by side, one beginning with Tarcisio and Anna's Lombard trattoria and the other with their sons' immersion in whisky.
How to fold Mulligans Irish Pub & Whisky Bar into your trip.
Mulligans Irish Pub & Whisky Bar works as the evening destination for a Ghisolfa route connecting a Renaissance country villa, Milan's great tram-building works and Carlo Maciachini's vast nineteenth-century complex of architecture and sculpture.
Begin at Villa Simonetta, whose first nucleus arose after Gualtiero Bascapè, chancellor to Ludovico il Moro, acquired agricultural land from the Ospedale Maggiore near the end of the fifteenth century for a country residence known as La Gualtiera. Ferrante Gonzaga acquired the property in 1547 and commissioned Tuscan architect Domenico Giunti to enlarge it into a representative suburban residence, adding lateral wings to form the surviving U-shaped composition before the Simonetta family acquired it in 1555. Continue to Fabbrica del Vapore, descended from the railway and tram works Antonio Carminati, Giuseppe Pozzi and Carlo Toselli established in 1899. The company employed 1,350 workers by 1919 and built the first prototype of Milan's model 1928 tram under engineers D'Alòi and Cuccoli, adapting the American Peter Witt concept before production exceeded 500 vehicles. Conclude at Cimitero Monumentale, where woodcarver Carlo Maciachini rose from modest beginnings in Induno Olona, studied architecture at Brera and won the competition for Milan's new cemetery. His project opened for burials in 1866, followed by the Central Ossuary in 1873 and the Famedio in 1887, creating an immense ensemble where later sculptors including Giannino Castiglioni and Leonardo Bistolfi contributed major funerary works. The progression moves from Bascapè and Gonzaga's Renaissance retreat through Carminati, Pozzi and Toselli's industrial production into Maciachini's architectural treatment of Milanese memory, revealing successive transformations of the territory surrounding Via Govone before the Bertoni family arrived.
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