Drogheria Milanese
via Conca del Naviglio, 7 - Milano
Drugstores. Dear, old, romantic drugstores.
Those grocery shops that selected their products attentively, and which have sadly started to be an endangered species…
Looking around for a small shop that could carry me back in time, I stumbled upon a bistrot that gives a lot of importance to primary products, a perfect drugstore that also offers various culinary services: the Drogheria Milanese.
It has now become a ‘must’ in the city: a marble floor, a long centered wooden table lit up by lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling, aligned with equally long benches where you can sit, old fashioned coffee tables with wooden stools, an elongated counter behind which most of the menu’s dishes are prepared, old posters and shelves that display the excellent products sold in the store.
The Drogheria Milanese was born from an idea of Andrea Meoni, to create a sort of italian ‘tapas bar’, a cute yet informal bistrot where you can taste many, delicious dishes. During one of our lunches here, Andrea delighted us with a few delectable dishes: toasted salmon with a yogurt herb dressing….If you’ve never tasted it, I suggest you run over to the store and try it yourself!
Slate dishes and cloth napkins bring you back to old countryside restaurants, one of the many examples of the contrasting style of this bistrot. Jams, cans of tomato sauce, tuna and anchovies are some of the shop’s best sellers; Montepulciano, Terra de Sogni (sicialian, biological, and excellent with red meats, as Richard, the maitre’d, explains to us), together with the classic Prosecco are instead the shop’s wine best sellers.
Andrea considers this place most of all a lifestyle: he loves to walk around local street markets to buy curious decor objects, that he then sets in his “prohibition area” of the drugstore; a top secret room where you can relax and enjoy comfy retire styled chairs. A delight for few lucky customers!
A delightful lunch or light dinner near the Naviglio, then.
Is this area too far away for you? Well…. Then be patient, another venue might just open near Brera very soon….