The Milan Starbucks--the chain's first (daringly) in Italy--has been open less than a year but already can be acclaimed a success. It's very popular, and not just with (American) tourists. This is no mean feat in Italy: Italians didn't invent coffee, but they certainly perfected it, and their coffee culture is rivaled, historically, only by Vienna's. Maybe France. And they're proud of it. FWIW, Starbucks in the US, in my experience, is nothing at all like Italian coffee culture. I'm more a Peets fan than Starbucks, but we had to go see the new Starbucks, just a couple blocks off the main Piazza.
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Larger and more ornate than any Starbucks of my experience; the old post office
renovated |
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I guess a certain amount of flattery, not to mention big bucks, got them a place
here, their first and only in Italy |
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Strangely, the Starbucks name appears mostly in fairly fine print, and there
are only a few of the images visible |
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View from our table; this is maybe a quarter of the place (we had a coffee and
a hot chocolate and some tasty Italian pastries) |
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| Half the menu, in plain Anglais |
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| Happily, my Starbucks app (from Missoula) came right up |
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Much of the floor space is an open gift shoppe, many things Starbucks- or coffee-
oriented |
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| A lot of it pretty high-end, too |
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| Part of the deal in Milan is to be a roastery; here's some of the apparatus |
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| Ditto |
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| Ditto again |
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| View of the downstairs bar |
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| From the beautiful upstairs marble bar |
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| You don't have to drink coffee |
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| Or even hot coffee |
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| Right; and now we're ready to move on to Mr. Smoky's Last Supper |
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