La Società Milano – a cocktail salon playing dress-up as dinner

La Società Milano occupies a townhouse on Via Panfilo Castaldi, in the restaurant-and-bar strip that runs between Porta Venezia and Piazza della Repubblica. It opened in 2019, the joint project of Giulia Litrenta and chef Andrea Romanelli, and it refuses to be only a restaurant or only a bar: cocktails and cooking are conceived together, under what the owners call their Flavor Philosophy. The rooms are dense with objects — family portraits, antique books, a butterfly collection, design pieces picked up over years — so that dinner here feels staged rather than merely served, down to the tiramisù assembled at the table. It is selected in the MICHELIN Guide, and has also picked up two forks from Gambero Rosso, recognition that sits oddly well against the live DJ sets and actors' studio evenings the owners also programme. For Milan, it is a rare address that treats a gin list and a tasting menu as equally serious propositions.

01The room and the setting

The restaurant sits inside what the trade calls a food zone — Via Panfilo Castaldi, the short street of restaurants and bars linking Porta Venezia to Piazza della Repubblica.

Inside there are three distinct rooms, each with its own soundtrack and its own patterned wallpaper shipped from London, so that the mood shifts as you move from one to the next. The Sala Camino centres on an eighteenth-century white Carrara marble fireplace and a backlit bar holding more than a hundred bottles of gin and spirits; the smaller Sala Ananas suits a table for two; the Sala Social Table runs to a single long table for up to twelve. Chandeliers, candelabra, mirrors and portraits of the owners' own ancestors fill the walls, closer to a lived-in salon than a conventional dining room.

02The chef and the kitchen

Andrea Romanelli runs the kitchen; experimentation, tradition, experience and creativity are the guiding principles behind his cooking. Giulia Litrenta, whose background is in real estate and nutrition, designed the rooms and now oversees the welcome and the bar — her own name signs off many of the thank-you notes guests leave online.

Insider tip

Closed Mondays; open late Tue–Sat, plus Sunday lunch and dinner. Book via the restaurant's own site.

The kitchen works from a seasonal menu that folds Mediterranean produce together with more exotic, sometimes Latin American, references without losing a sense of technique. Dishes such as amberjack caponata and duck breast cooked in the French style sit at the centre of that balance between tradition and invention.

03What to order

La carbonara di agnello pairs fusilloni cooked in pecorino water with a carbonara cream and lamb soffritto and its reduced jus, finished with a pecorino fonduta; La cacio e pepe di mare sets squid-ink tagliolini against a lemon prawn tartare, squid-ink mousse, cured red egg yolk and a cacio e pepe fonduta, with gnocchi of scorpion fish also on the list.

For those who want the kitchen to choose, there is a three-course menu called L'Italia a Morsi and a five-course Amarcord, both built by Andrea Romanelli from the same à la carte he cooks every night. Among the classics that keep returning to tables are vitello tonnato with sour cream and fried capers, and the house tiramisù, mixed and assembled at the table rather than brought ready-plated.

04Wine and drinks

The cocktail bar is arguably what put La Società on Milan's map first: the back-lit bottle library runs past a hundred gin and spirit labels, and Giulia Litrenta's drinks are built to pair with specific dishes rather than sit apart from the menu, in keeping with the restaurant's stated Flavor Philosophy of treating food and cocktails as a single act.

05When to go and booking

The restaurant is closed on Mondays. It opens Tuesday to Thursday from 18:00 to 01:00, Friday and Saturday from 18:00 to 02:00, and on Sundays both for lunch, from 12:30 to 15:30, and for dinner, from 18:00 to midnight — hours that make it as plausible for a late aperitivo as for a full seated dinner. Tables and the fixed menus can be booked directly through the restaurant's own site.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.