“I’ve been here since the very beginning,” Luca Ardito jokingly assures us. That’s not surprising. The Carlton Milan, and its Carlton Bar, only opened in November 2025, marking Rocco Forte Hotels’ latest Italian address, with 71 suites and rooms, two restaurants, a spa, and this – The Carlton Bar, where the mixology is overseen by Luca, their resident Director of Bars, and Salvatore Calabrese.
Luca Ardito is Lombard by birth and London-trained by choice. “I love London,” he enthuses, “a city that gave me everything.” There, he spent five years at Donovan Bar at Brown’s Hotel – also a Rocco Forte property, as it happens – working alongside Calabrese before returning to Italy to open bars at Hotel Gallia, ONE Milan Vertical, and Cipriani House.
The Carlton Bar Milan’s Director And The Maestro
Salvatore Calabrese needs no introduction – though here is one anyway. Born in Maiori on the Amalfi Coast, he built his reputation across four decades in London – at Dukes, at The Lanesborough, and at his own Salvatore’s at FIFTY – becoming one of the most decorated bartenders in the world. He is known for his encyclopaedic knowledge of vintage spirits and, in 2012, for mixing the oldest cocktail ever recorded, made with an 1858 Clos de Griffier Vieux Cognac. His title – The Maestro – has been well earned.
A Thousand Years In The Making
The Carlton has been, by Luca’s own reckoning, five years in the making. Although the building itself has a longer story. The site sits on what was once Via Senato’s aristocratic canal – part of Milan’s Navigli network, developed from the 10th century, its banks lined with the palazzos of the Visconti, Serbelloni and Guastalla families. When the canals were paved over in the 1930s, the area’s hidden facades and inner courtyards came to the fore.
The current building was conceived as a hotel in 1963 by Novecentisti architect Ferdinando Reggiori, incorporating elements of an earlier 19th-century structure. Renovation began in 2020 and was completed on 18th November 2025. Five years in the making, then – or, depending on how you count, closer to a thousand.
Unavoidable By Design
The Carlton Bar is, happily, unavoidable. Set at the heart of the hotel, equidistant between its two entrances – one on Via Senato and the other on Via della Spiga – with a large garden terrace spilling down in front of it. You pass by it whether you mean to or not. And most likely end up staying.
Above the bar, clusters of bowl-shaped glass light fixtures drift across the ceiling like jellyfish suspended mid-current – warm and luminous. Below them, the bar is all Rosso Levanto marble and embossed white plaster, brass-legged stools pulled up to the counter, and small lamps on copper-topped tables spreading a low amber glow across the room. On the walls, a framed abstract painting with slashing black calligraphic lines might have come from the incendiary ’60s – fittingly the point where the hotel and the menu begins – giving the space the feeling of somewhere that has been lived in for longer than it has. Which, given the building’s history, is perhaps the point.
The Carlton Bar Is Serving Up Three Decades Of Milan
The Carlton Bar’s first cocktail list, Three Decades, takes Milan’s golden era as its subject – the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, when economic optimism collided with fashion, design, and a city increasingly in love with the idea of itself. Twelve cocktails across three chapters: the ’60s represented by Industry & Technology, the ’70s Fashion & Music, and finally Milano da Bere – Milan to drink – the phrase that captured the ’80s in a glass. A prosperous, hedonistic and unapologetic time for Milan. A city so full of confidence it became a lifestyle.
Each section features three alcoholic and one non-alcoholic drink, catering to Milan’s recent spike in event activities. “Fashion week we sell a lot of non-alcoholic drinks, design week – which just ended – we serve more spirit-forward drinks,” Luca says.
Alongside The Decades menu are seven Calabrese signatures – including the Breakfast Martini, the Spicy Fifty, the Negroni Svegliato – each a fixed point in the canon of modern mixology. “Working with Salvatore again,” Luca says, pouring a direct Martini – just a mini one, with time, to start – twisting a slice of lemon over it before dropping it in, as we pore over the menu, “is like coming home.”
The Era-Spanning Drinks
The Boutique – with Brugal 1888, Dalmore 12, Grand Marnier Royal, Biancosarti, almond butter and curry – is rich and silky, spicy, layered and a little unpredictable, which feels right for a drink meant to evoke the creative chaos of the ’70s. “I like this style,” Luca says, of the cacao butter rim, scrunching his nose at the thought of a garnish balanced awkwardly on the ice.
Then the Milanese Noble: Macallan 12, Campari, Mancino Red Vermouth, fig leaf kombucha. Refined, intense – a sort of Americano – and precisely as elegant as the decade it honours. If Milano da Bere had a house drink, it would be this. It arrives in a glass set into a base of specifically selected marble. No garnish. A spray of Essenzia’s green mandarin.
Asked to choose a decade, Luca doesn’t hesitate. The ’80s. The London connection is obvious – the same years that made Milano da Bere were the years Calabrese was building his name at Dukes and The Lanesborough. “I’m from the ’90s, but the ’80s I think was the best,” Luca says, looking out across the garden, towards Milan. “It was an amazing time – planting a new seed that continues to grow.” He nods, as a group of guests linger at the entrance to The Carlton Bar, before, inevitably, stopping by for a drink.
