Why you should experience The Friends Pub Milano in Milan, Italy.
The Friends Pub Milano is a fraternal British restaurant pub where Porta Nuova's after-work culture, four brothers' fascination with British pub traditions, twenty-six years of beer stewardship and a recent shift toward full restaurant dining converge through a project built explicitly around friendship.
Set along Viale Monte Santo near Via Galileo Galilei and just steps from Porta Nuova, nineteenth-century bastion geometry meets the office streets stretching toward Piazza della Repubblica and the dense architectural transition into northern Central Milan. Dark timber, framed British memorabilia, beer taps and tightly grouped tables establish the visual language of a traditional pub without allowing decorative detail to overwhelm the working bar. Evenings gather momentum around pints and dinner before football screenings, recurring celebrations and late service turn individual tables into a more communal room; Sunday introduces a separate lunchtime rhythm through the pub's dedicated roast service. The result is a deeply established Porta Nuova address whose fraternal origins still govern the relationship between British food, draught beer and the social rituals that Antonio, Silvio, Claudio and Stefano Losapio set out to reproduce in Milan.
What you should know about The Friends Pub Milano.
The Friends Pub Milano is best known for the project Antonio, Stefano, Silvio and Claudio Losapio founded in 2000 after their shared fascination with British culture developed into the ambition to recreate an English pub in Milan. The four brothers made friendship the organizing principle from the outset, even choosing the name to describe the intimate social relationship they wanted between staff and patrons. Beer expertise became a second pillar. For more than fifteen years the team has taught draught-service courses to aspiring publicans and enthusiasts through the Publican Experience method. Silvio Losapio won Stella Artois's Draught Masters Italia competition in 2019 as Italy's best beer pourer. By that year the pub operated twelve taps plus thirty to thirty-five bottled beers, with Brothers IPA produced under its own label and Guinness, Spaten, Löwenbräu Pils, Tennent's Super and Bass among the leading draught selections. Silvio and Antonio were named as managers. Brothers IPA later gained a companion house recipe, Four B Bitter Ale, created exclusively with partner brewers and dispensed through a hand pump in English fashion. The pub marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2025 and simultaneously changed direction. Its founders recast the classic pub as a Restaurant Pub, moving British cooking into a more prominent role without abandoning the beer program that had defined the preceding quarter-century.
Fish & Chips starts with cod enclosed in bitter-ale batter and served with Old School Fries. The Friends Burger layers beef, tomato, salad, crispy bacon, cheddar, fried egg and the house Salsa 2000 inside an artisan bun; its rosemary-scented potatoes are sliced by hand and fried twice. Guinness Stewed Beef receives twelve hours in stout before cooking at low temperature for as long as ten hours. Bangers & Mash turns to sausages and onion gravy, then Guinnessmisù carries the same stout into dessert through soaked savoiardi, mascarpone cream, Guinness jelly, honey and cacao nibs. Sunday Roast establishes a separate weekly sequence through Royal Roast Beef with gravy or turkey with red-fruit sauce, both accompanied by seasonal vegetables and Yorkshire puddings. Beer remains equally specific: Brothers is a 6.2% IPA with tropical-fruit aromas, and Four B is a 3.9% bitter ale served less chilled and with restrained carbonation through its traditional pump. Whisky receives its own ritual through a tasting glass, fresh water, ice, dosing pipette and small sweet or savory accompaniments, extending the pub's attention to service technique beyond draught beer.
How to fold The Friends Pub Milano into your trip.
The Friends Pub Milano works as the dinner-and-drinks anchor for a Porta Nuova route connecting sixteenth-century Franciscan architecture, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli's postwar intellectual institution and Herzog & de Meuron's twenty-first-century intervention along the former Spanish walls.
Begin at Chiesa di Sant'Angelo, whose present complex arose after Ferrante Gonzaga ordered an earlier Franciscan church demolished for Milan's new fortifications. Archbishop Giovanni Arcimboldi laid the first stone on February 21, 1552, and Domenico Giunti designed a single-nave Latin-cross church lined with chapels. Nineteenth-century suppression emptied the convent and reduced the church to use as a military stable; the Franciscans recovered the complex in 1922, and Giovanni Muzio later designed the present convent. Continue to Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, whose institutional history began as a library in 1949 before becoming an institute in 1960 and later a foundation. A collection devoted to European social history had reached 200,000 volumes by its March 1961 inauguration. Its holdings now encompass 1.5 million items, 250,000 volumes, 17,500 periodical titles and 15,000 posters. Conclude at Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Headquarters, the 2,700-square-meter building Herzog & de Meuron completed in 2016 beside the trace of the sixteenth-century Spanish walls. The five-story structure concentrates a bookstore, performance hall, offices, seminar rooms and a top-floor reading room beneath its steeply pitched roof, giving Feltrinelli's institution an architectural presence conceived specifically for Porta Volta. The progression moves from Giunti's Franciscan rebuilding through Feltrinelli's postwar intellectual project into Herzog & de Meuron's contemporary architecture, setting the Losapio brothers' British pub within a northern Milan itinerary shaped by religion, publishing and architectural renewal.
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