Why you should experience Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Milan, Italy.
Starbucks Reserve Roastery is an ambitious coffee destination where Cordusio's Belle Époque commercial grandeur meets Milan's formative influence on modern café culture, Italian craft traditions and large-scale coffee roasting inside the former Palazzo delle Poste.
Set along Cordusio near Via Orefici and just steps from the medieval streets leading toward Piazza Mercanti, the Roastery occupies the curved grand frontage of Palazzo Broggi at the midpoint between the Duomo and Castello Sforzesco, placing an unusually expansive coffee operation inside one of Milan's densest pedestrian crossroads. Entry opens into a soaring hall where the original architectural volume frames a patterned stone floor, long counters, polished metalwork and the immense central roasting installation, with circulation wrapping around the machinery so coffee production remains visible from several angles. The visit develops across distinct zones without losing that central focus: espresso and alternative extractions occupy the main bar, breads and pastries emerge beside the wood-fired Princi oven, roasting activity animates the center, and a staircase leads upward toward cocktails before the terrace returns the experience to Cordusio. Changing sounds and aromas reinforce that movement, with grinding, brewing and roasting accompanying the smell of coffee before warm bread and later spirits introduce different phases across morning, afternoon and evening. The result is a coffeehouse conceived at architectural scale, using the grandeur of Cordusio and the continuous visibility of production to turn a familiar Milanese ritual into a prolonged exploration of roasting, brewing, baking and mixology.
What you should know about Starbucks Reserve Roastery.
Starbucks Reserve Roastery is best known for completing a circle that began when Howard Schultz visited Milan in 1983 and encountered the Italian espresso bars that subsequently shaped his ambitions for Starbucks. More than three decades passed before the company entered Italy, and Schultz chose its premium Roastery format for the debut, making Milan the first market Starbucks entered through its most elaborate coffee concept. The project became the company's third Reserve Roastery after Seattle and Shanghai, its first in Europe and its first Italian location when it opened in September 2018. Starbucks placed the operation inside Palazzo Broggi, designed by Luigi Broggi between 1899 and 1901 to complete the elliptical architecture of Cordusio and originally house the Milan Stock Exchange. Achille Alberti created its façade decoration, Angelo Comolli painted the ceilings of the vestibule and great hall, and the building subsequently became Milan's central post office before Starbucks assumed the principal public space. Chief design officer Liz Muller led the Roastery project with a mandate that tied the American company closely to Italian production, and every finished component used for the original project was made in Italy. Tuscan sculptor Giovanni Balderi carved the portico's Siren from Carrara marble. Milanese data-visualization designer Giorgia Lupi and her Accurat team created the immense engraved brass installation tracing Starbucks and coffee history, with local craftspeople producing the physical work and an augmented-reality layer extending its information digitally. The 25,000-square-foot operation was projected to roast 1.2 million pounds of Reserve coffee during its first year and cycle through twenty coffees annually. Rocco Princi brought another Milanese lineage into the project through the on-site bakery, extending a partnership built around the baker who had carried his childhood experience with communal wood ovens into his Milan business. Arriviamo introduced another first as the earliest cocktail bar inside any Starbucks Roastery. Master roaster Brad Anderson helped establish the Milan roasting operation and trained Oscar Manuel Quintana Hernandez, a former Madrid barista and Spanish coffee ambassador who became Milan's master roaster in 2022. Anderson and Quintana later collaborated with Sergio Alvarez on Milano Duetto, developing one blend through nearly a dozen iterations before roasting it in two distinct forms as Milano Sole and Milano Luna in 2024.
The main bar begins with espresso as the reference point, then changes the extraction mechanism through pour-over, siphon and other Reserve preparations so the same fundamental ingredients produce different balances of body, aroma and clarity. Coffee emerging from the roasting area gives those methods an immediate production context, with green beans transformed through heat before resting, brewing and service complete the sequence within the same hall. Princi extends roasting into baking through a wood-fired oven, moving from coffee aroma toward warm focaccia, pizza al taglio, bread and pastry as the day advances. Arriviamo then redirects coffee into spirits, making the roasted bean an ingredient within drinks whose techniques reach beyond conventional café preparation. Andrea Villa's current six-cocktail collection uses the Milano Roastery Microblend, whose maraschino-cherry and hazelnut-chocolate notes provide a common coffee foundation across contrasting ingredients. Eden Elixir joins that coffee with Sandeman Ruby Port, blackberry liqueur, elderflower syrup and Piedmontese fig-leaf liqueur before dried fig introduces another aromatic layer between sips. Drops of Gold changes both texture and geography through Nikka whisky infused with Valle del Belice extra-virgin olive oil, filtered coffee, Valdostan Ratafià and pineapple, finished with three drops of olive oil across the surface. Coffee consequently travels through the building in successive physical states, moving from roasting drum to extraction, alongside wood-fired baking and finally into contemporary mixology.
How to fold Starbucks Reserve Roastery into your trip.
Starbucks Reserve Roastery works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing Milanese patronage, Renaissance painting and the transformation of the historic center from ecclesiastical culture into modern commercial power.
Begin at Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, created after Cardinal Federico Borromeo founded the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in 1607 and donated his collection of paintings, sculpture and drawings to establish the Pinacoteca in 1618. Borromeo assembled a teaching collection that now places Caravaggio's Basket of Fruit, Raphael's preparatory cartoon for The School of Athens, Leonardo da Vinci's Portrait of a Musician, works by Titian and Botticelli and the drawings of the Codex Atlanticus within a single institution rooted in Counter-Reformation Milan. Continue to San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore, begun in 1503 for the city's major Benedictine women's monastery and developed through figures including Gian Giacomo Dolcebuono and Cristoforo Solari. Bernardino Luini and other Lombard painters covered its divided public and monastic interiors with sixteenth-century frescoes, and Gian Giacomo Antegnati built the nuns' mechanical organ between 1554 and 1557 with fifty notes and a twenty-note pedalboard. Conclude at Palazzo Mezzanotte, created after Milan's Chamber of Commerce acquired the Piazza Affari site for a unified stock exchange and commissioned Paolo Mezzanotte to design its new headquarters. Construction began in 1929 and the exchange opened there in 1932, concentrating Milan's financial trading inside a purpose-built institution only a short walk from Palazzo Broggi, the earlier Cordusio building originally conceived for the same commercial function. The progression moves from Borromeo's seventeenth-century art institution through Dolcebuono, Solari, Luini and Antegnati's monastic complex into Mezzanotte's twentieth-century financial architecture, tracing the religious, artistic and commercial institutions that accumulated around the historic center before Starbucks Reserve Roastery entered Cordusio.
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