Rita's Tiki Room, Milan

Why you should experience Rita's Tiki Room in Milan, Italy.

Rita's Tiki Room is an immersive cocktail bar where Navigli's canal-side drinking culture, Edoardo Nono's three decades behind the bar, Chiara Buzzi's creative partnership and Matteo Oioli's theatrical interpretation of American tiki converge around rum, tropical fruit and an unusually serious program of house-made cocktail ingredients.

Set along Ripa di Ticinese near Via Carlo D'Adda and just steps from Naviglio Grande, the bar sits across the canal-side territory from Rita & Cocktails, the American bar whose success supplied the foundation for the newer project. Set designer Matteo Oioli transformed the interior through woven coconut walls, bamboo, carved timber, dense vegetation and a canoe suspended above the long bar, with craftsman Paul Campese producing the wooden tiki sculpture. High tables maintain sightlines toward the bartenders, and a second room introduces lower seating before the premises open into a courtyard garden within a traditional Milanese casa di ringhiera. The result is a Navigli bar where Oioli's scenography gives Nono and Buzzi's tropical cocktail program a physical world distinct from the original Rita across the neighborhood.

What you should know about Rita's Tiki Room.

Rita's Tiki Room is best known for Edoardo Nono and Chiara Buzzi turning nearly two decades of Rita cocktail culture into a dedicated tropical bar conceived and built in only thirty days. Nono's route to the Navigli began far from hospitality school. Born in Varese in 1969, he studied telecommunications and started waiting tables at the Passatore tennis club on Lake Varese in 1988 to finance his holidays. Resort work followed, and by 1992 the twenty-three-year-old Nono was running a fifteen-person bar brigade. Cruise ships took him to America, with subsequent work spanning Rimini, Lausanne and Milan before he completed Hotel Management studies at the University of Tourism in Rimini. Nono met future business partner Gianluca Chiaruttini at Lido di Luino in 1993. By 1998 he was back behind a Milan bar and created Gin Zen, combining gin with freshly pounded ginger, lime and soda years before fresh produce became widespread in the city's cocktail scene. Nono and Chiaruttini opened Rita & Cocktails on December 12, 2002. Fresh juices, seasonal produce and house preparations distinguished its American-bar model during a period when commercial syrups and prepared ingredients dominated much of Milanese drinking. Chiara Buzzi entered the Rita group as director in 2018 after a career path through arts and humanities. A new opportunity arrived only months later when premises formerly occupied by seafood restaurant Ringa became available nearby. Nono and Buzzi built Rita's Tiki Room between April 8 and May 8, 2019. Gianluca Chiaruttini remained part of the wider Rita operation, and Buzzi became the new project's director and partner. Matteo Oioli supplied the scenography after Nono decided that a conventional architectural treatment would not create the American tiki environment he wanted. Executive chef Eugenio Roncoroni, already known through Al Mercato and Noodle Bar, developed the food program. The next generation behind the counter strengthened the project further. Andrea Arcaini, who had joined Rita after moving to Milan in 2014, became bar manager across the group. Monopoli-born Alessandro D'Alessio arrived at Rita's Tiki Room after early work in Puglia and a London period that included La Bodega Negra and chef Robin Gill's Darby's. D'Alessio rose from junior bartender to head bartender and won both the 2024 Bar Awards Italian Under 30 bartender prize and Campari Academy's Campari Bartender of the Year title.

Rum supplies the foundation for a collection exceeding 350 labels, yet house preparations give individual cocktails their sharper distinctions. Mai Tai combines the bar's own rum mix with house orgeat, dry orange and lime. Pearl Diver uses another proprietary rum blend with Gardenia Mix, citrus and Angostura, producing a richer preparation built around the historic tiki combination of butter, honey and spice. Jasper's Jamaican Daiquiri tightens Rare Old Jamaican rum with pimento liqueur, honey, lime and nutmeg. Nuclear Daiquiri pushes Jamaican overproof rum against green Chartreuse, ginger falernum and lime. Greek Island Groove brings mastiha into rum, gin, orgeat and ginger falernum, introducing the resinous character of Chios into a Fog Cutter variation. Capoeira changes direction through cachaça, coconut cream, coffee liqueur, passion fruit and lime. Italian Fog Cutter folds Marsala Vecchio and dark-grape acquavite into rum, gin, orgeat and citrus. Tiki Rum Barrel expands the scale for three drinkers through a house rum mixture, four citrus and tropical juices, honey, falernum, almond, grenadine, absinthe and bitters. Roncoroni's kitchen follows the drinks across several culinary regions. Honolulu scallops wrap shellfish in bacon before grilling them with caramelized pineapple and yuzu sauce. Pad Thai combines griddled rice noodles, prawns, tamarind, spring onion, peanuts and sprouts, and Maialino Kalhua fills suckling pig with lemongrass before an eight-hour roast. Golden cod closes the same tropical thread through banana-leaf cooking, pineapple sauce, fresh ginger and basmati rice.

How to fold Rita's Tiki Room into your trip.

Rita's Tiki Room works as the evening endpoint for an afternoon following Naviglio Grande from the labor once performed directly against its water through centuries of canal commerce into the Visconti religious complex that greeted travelers approaching Milan from the west.

Begin at Vicolo dei Lavandai, where the surviving washhouse preserves the physical infrastructure of a trade practiced beside Naviglio Grande into the twentieth century. The name derives from the male laundry workers originally organized through the eighteenth-century Confraternita Lavandai di Milano, who collected linen from affluent households and carried it to the canal in baskets. Stone washing slabs survive beside the water, and an adjacent courtyard retains an early twentieth-century centrifuge once used to dry clothing. Continue along Naviglio Grande itself, begun during the twelfth century and completed by 1239 before navigation developed by 1272. Its fifty-kilometer course linked Milan with the Ticino and Lake Maggiore, carrying cut stone, brick, timber, coal, food, metals and other cargo toward the city. Between 1830 and the end of the nineteenth century, Darsena traffic averaged 8,300 boats and 350,000 tonnes of goods annually. Conclude at San Cristoforo sul Naviglio, where an older church rebuilt in 1192 stands beside the fifteenth-century Cappella Ducale erected under Visconti patronage after the plague of 1399. Frate Pietro Franzoni di Tavernasco established a pilgrims' hospital beside the earlier church in 1364, and Gian Galeazzo Visconti's later chapel carried the family biscione beside Milan's red cross. Ludovico il Moro met Beatrice d'Este here in 1491 as she arrived from Ferrara for their marriage. The progression moves from the canal labor preserved at Vicolo dei Lavandai through the commercial artery of Naviglio Grande into the Visconti patronage and ceremonial arrivals of San Cristoforo, building the historical route surrounding Rita's Tiki Room.

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