There are shortbread pastries and elaborate cakes and fresh croissants on display. There are rows of panettoni, the most traditional milanese holiday dessert, in red and pink boxes. There are shining bottles of fine spirits behind the bar, and round tables covered in white tablecloths, and the whole place feels warm, traditional and familiar.
Walking into a crowd sipping bright orange spritz cocktails, the passerby is forgiven if for a moment he thinks he’s in Milan during aperitivo time. He’s not. He’s in Sant Ambroeus on Madison Avenue, the offspring of the Milanese Sant Ambroeus, one of the most famous and traditional cafés in the Italian city.
Sant Ambroeus first opened in Milan in 1936, in the very heart of the city, and soon became a go-to café to have breakfast and buy elaborate festive cakes. Then, in the 1980s, it did what many Italians did before and sailed to New York City. The Madison Avenue location has been a fixture on the Upper East Side ever since.
Gherardo Guarducci, the co-founder of the Sant Ambroeus Hospitality Group, says the New York location feels so close to its parent location in Milan - because it’s not much different from it, despite the ocean in between. Milanese people know Sant Ambroeus has one of the most famous cafes in the city center, the one where you go with your grandparents to buy pastries for a Sunday lunch, and where you taste your first sip of coffee. It’s intergenerational.
“We’ve been in New York for more than 30 years now,” he says, “We now have grandchildren coming in with stories about their grandparents coming to Sant Ambroeus in the 1980s. It is to the Upper East Side much like what the Milanese location is to the Montenapoleone area. And it communicates its sense of the place by way of its location, its culture, its tradition.” With its decade long establishment on Madison Avenue, Sant Ambroeus has become as iconic in New York as it is in Milan, and it’s part of the story of both cities.
One thing is different though, according to Guarducci. “Sant Ambroeus in Milan does not really have the fine-dining aspect that the one in New York has,” he says. “I would bet one dollar that you know the Sant Ambroeus in Milan for coffee and pastries and cappuccino, you probably have never dined there. In New York, it is regarded very much as a restaurant, a full dining restaurant.” To first time diners, he’d recommend the great Milanese classics: vitello tonnato (veal roast plunged in creamy tuna sauce), risotto alla milanese (risotto with saffron and parmesan cheese), and cutèleta alla milanese (breaded meat fried in oil and butter).
Sant Ambroeus has thrived in the United States. Four more restaurants and three standing coffee bars have come after the opening of the iconic Madison Avenue location. One of the restaurants is in Palm Beach, Florida, and, according to Guiducci, a new one is scheduled to open in Bal Harbour in Miami.
