Why you should experience Pinch Spirits & Kitchen in Milan, Italy.
Pinch Spirits & Kitchen is a characterful cocktail bar where Navigli's canal culture, Mattia Lissoni's bartending career, Italian spirits and a retro drinking-room aesthetic converge directly along the Naviglio Grande.
Set along Ripa di Ticinese near Via Corsico and just steps from Vicolo dei Lavandai, the bar occupies one of the Naviglio Grande's most concentrated stretches, where old railing houses and narrow passages face the canal beside restaurants, workshops and drinking rooms extending toward the Darsena. The interior draws from the late 1930s and 1940s through aged wood furniture, vintage mirrors, chandeliers, faded fabrics and high stools facing the counter, with subdued yellow lighting carrying the period character through a room that opens toward the waterfront. Bartenders work in close view from the counter as the canal-side tables fill outside, creating a continuous exchange between cocktail preparation, conversation and the movement along Ripa di Ticinese through the evening. The result is a Navigli bar where period furnishings, close counter interaction and direct contact with the Naviglio Grande give sophisticated cocktail work the relaxed scale of a neighborhood drinking room.
What you should know about Pinch Spirits & Kitchen.
Pinch Spirits & Kitchen is best known for Mattia Lissoni, whose progression from photographer and glass washer to bartender, bar manager, proprietor and competition winner became inseparable from the development of the Navigli cocktail bar. Born in Milan in 1985, Lissoni entered hospitality while working as a photographer and seeking supplementary income, beginning at the bottom of the bar hierarchy before Fausto Polestra and Umberto Consiglio introduced him to work behind the counter. Enrico Contro and Sergio Sbizzera became later mentors, with Sbizzera training him for four years as Lissoni progressed through Cape Town Café, Pravda Vodka Bar and Lacerba before managing Banco. Giovanni Ripoldi and Massimo Manera then approached Lissoni with the concept that developed into Pinch, joined during its founding period by Chiara Dehò and the experience of Sbizzera, already an established figure in Milanese bartending. Lissoni built his work at Pinch around Italian vermouths, amari and liqueurs, bringing Fernet Branca, Rabarbaro Zucca, grappa and other national spirits into contemporary cocktail construction. Barawards selected him among its Bartender of the Year candidates in 2016, placing his work at Pinch within a national field of leading bartenders. The counter became a collaborative workshop as Fabio Brugnolaro, Carlo Simbula, Erik Viola, Fabrizio Latino and Antonio Galetta contributed successive seasonal programs, with a 2016 edition presented as The Daily Pinch, a magazine styled after early twentieth-century newspapers. Lissoni transferred leadership of the counter to Erik Viola in 2018 and created Pinch Out as a separate creative division dedicated to external cocktail projects and group sessions, while Viola and Piero Carnieletto marked the transition with a twelve-drink retrospective drawn from creations developed across Pinch's first four years. Lissoni added a national competition victory in February 2019 when his Sembra Cola ma non è won Best CokeTail 2018 before a jury including Employees Only co-founder Dushan Zaric. Viola subsequently continued as Pinch bar manager, developing house-made shrubs and other preparations through an approach centered on drinks with recognizable flavor structures. More than a decade of successive bartenders has consequently given Pinch a creative lineage extending well beyond its founding team.
Paestum brings gin together with Mastiha, pink grapefruit, basil, lemon and balsamic vinegar, a 2014 Lissoni creation whose herbal and acidic structure survived into the bar's later retrospective selection. Sisti Chuan infuses gin with Sichuan pepper before dried tomato, Fernet Branca and dry-vermouth foam push the drink through spice, bitterness and savory flavor. PG INC. shifts toward mezcal with a caper-and-olive shrub, lime, basil and caper powder. Erik Viola's Pepper Porn starts from tequila and bell-pepper cordial before orange, beer and pepper salt extend the vegetable character through the glass and its rim. Curcumatto combines gin, Centerbe, cherry liqueur, turmeric and fig jam. Later work under Viola moved further into house production through shrubs such as those developed for Ninkasi and Freya, using fruit, sugar and vinegar to build concentrated cocktail components before service. The sequence shows how Pinch's bartenders repeatedly moved familiar spirits into preparations shaped by herbs, vegetables, Italian bitters, acidity and house-made ingredients.
How to fold Pinch Spirits & Kitchen into your trip.
Pinch Spirits & Kitchen works as the evening culmination for a Navigli itinerary tracing the district through canal labor, religious expansion and the conversion of Milanese industry into a major cultural institution.
Begin at Vicolo dei Lavandai, where a surviving washhouse preserves the commercial labor once performed beside a small channel fed by the Naviglio Grande. The Confraternita dei Lavandai di Milano reaches back to the eighteenth century, male washermen dominated the trade during the nineteenth century and workers later knelt on wooden brellin to scrub clothing against angled stone slabs, while a former shop supplied soap and bleach and an early twentieth-century centrifuge survives at number 6. Continue to Santa Maria delle Grazie al Naviglio, whose history began with a chapel erected in 1556 to house a venerated image of the Madonna before a larger Baroque church replaced it and suffered severe fire damage in 1719. Population growth prompted another reconstruction at the turn of the twentieth century, with Cesare Nava's 1900 project advancing from the apse and crossing in 1901 until the new church was completed and consecrated by Cardinal Andrea Carlo Ferrari in 1909, leaving its brick facade unfinished. Conclude at Mudec, developed within the former Ansaldo industrial complex after Milan acquired the disused site and launched an international architectural competition in 1999 won by David Chipperfield. The museum opened during Expo 2015 around Chipperfield's luminous central agorà, inserting a new zinc-titanium and translucent-glass architectural composition within the surviving industrial perimeter while providing a permanent home for Milan's ethnographic collections. The progression moves from the washermen and physical labor preserved at Vicolo dei Lavandai through Nava's reconstruction of Santa Maria delle Grazie al Naviglio into Chipperfield's conversion of former Ansaldo territory into Mudec.
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