Walking from the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele and past the Duomo di Milano just a five minute stroll in the side streets of Milan brought me to a small Princi bakery and caffè that I was lucky enough to stumble upon during Milan Design Week over fifteen years ago. Via Speronari is a pedestrianised and unremarkable street except for a bakery designed by Claudio Silvestrin, an architect and designer who has worked with Pawson, Armani, Anish Kapoor and Kanye West – for fifteen years – and is widely regarded as a master of contemporary minimalism.
Rocco Princi began making artisan bread in a small Calabrian village in the mid 80’s before moving to Milan and opening his own bakery and espresso bar. In 2006 Claudio Silvestrin Architects completed the Via Speronari caffè. Princi now has outposts in London, New York, Dubai, Tokyo and Shanghai as well as other locations in Milan.
Compared to what was around seventeen years ago Princi was a revelation. The bread is baked with organic flour and no yeast and the baking process is fully on view, the brick baking oven only separated from the caffè by a glass wall. Porphyry stone lines walls and floor, it’s colour almost the same as the crust of the bread on display. It is smooth on the floor and rough on the entrance wall facing the bronze counter. Candles, in a recess in the long wall and recessed spotlights in the ceiling over the counter provide the illumination for your morning caffè doppio. Recent photos show a long raised counter and tall stools with more recessed spots overhead have blocked off the candle recess. This sadly has not improved the design and I’m not sure whether it has improved the turnover as the place was always busy when I went, but people only stayed for five to ten minutes and then made way. Seats crowd the counter area and encourage people to linger. On my last visit the purity of the original design was still in place.
In most Italian caffès that serve locals rather than tourists you pay for your coffee first, hold on to the receipt, and then go to the counter to order the coffee. It will be (or should be) a small, dark hit of caffeine, frothy milk is generally not the norm for most of the regulars here, neither was sitting down, so I’m not sure if the stools and counter indicate there are now more tourists coming to Princi as their fame as grown, or Milanese coffee etiquette has changed. At least when I was last there the option, if you wanted to linger, mostly centred around standing at a couple of stone block tables set near the rough stone wall a little deeper into the caffè. They are architecturally very pretty stone tables, however, and the wall in that part of the cafe had a waterfall flowing down into a stone trough.
Years ago, when I first walked past, I didn’t know about Princi and I didn’t know Claudio Silvestrin had designed a bakery for them, but it was the design that brought me inside and brought me back several times since but the coffee and both the selection and the quality of the pastries also helped and the smell of the baking bread was amazing.
Starbucks took a stake Princi about six years ago after five years of ‘wooing’ Princi. This developed from the second of Howard Schultz’s Italian ‘epiphanies’ when he first visited Princi in Milan. (His first epiphany was encountering Italian coffee bars for the first time – and look what that led to!). His original plan was for 1,000 stand-alone Princi stores and the same number of Starbucks Reserve stores serving Princi food as well as Princi being the main draw of the 20-30 Roastery flagships in ‘iconic cities.’ That plan seems not to have happened and with the pandemic and a change of focus the stand-alone US stores have shut and there are only six Roasteries with no plans to expand. Reading the comments on Trip Advisor I see that various commentators have mentioned that Princi Milan now serves Starbucks Reserve coffee and several items on the menu reminded them of the US chain. Sadly, I doubt this is an improvement on my last visit which, now that I live in Hong Kong, was a few years ago. My experience then was fantastic, if short, as I bought my doppio and croissant, ate standing up by the waterfall and left in under ten minutes trying not to look too much like a tourist.
