The restaurateur’s new Italian bar aims for a mid-August opening with vintage Lambretta, Negronis, and the kind of pre-dinner ritual that defined 1960s Milan.
Ellen Yin’s next project is arriving in Philadelphia with a very specific aesthetic vision. Bar Cicci, slated to open mid-August in the Rittenhouse neighborhood, is built around the Italian aperitivo tradition, that golden-hour ritual of pre-dinner drinks and snacks that defined Milan’s social scene for decades. The space will include a vintage Lambretta scooter as a centerpiece, a nod to the era when the Vespa’s Lambretta competitor became shorthand for Italian style.
The bar represents Yin’s most focused cultural statement since Zahav established her as Philadelphia’s most thoughtful restaurateur. Where her other concepts trade in broader Mediterranean influences, Bar Cicci zeroes in on a single moment in Italian social history, translating it into cocktails, bitters, and the kind of furniture and detail work that communicates mood before the first drink arrives. The menu will lean toward classic Italian aperitivos, the kind meant to sharpen appetite rather than replace dinner.
For a city still sorting through its bar landscape, Cicci’s arrival marks a shift toward specificity over novelty. This isn’t another craft cocktail bar retrofitting Italian touches. It’s a room built from the ground up around how Italians actually drank in the 1960s, when the aperitivo was less about getting drunk and more about the theater of it all.
