Cafe Ginori at Bergdorf Goodman

Four menus, four porcelain collections: that is the organising idea at Café Ginori, the Ginori 1735 café on The Beauty Level at Bergdorf Goodman in New York City, where lunch, afternoon tea and aperitivo each arrive on a different pattern. The tableware is not decoration here. It is the reason the room exists.

Four menus, four patterns

Ginori 1735 built the café around four distinct menus, each paired with a porcelain collection from its own archive, so the plate shifts with the hour of the visit. Dishes come out on Oriente Italiano, the house’s most recognisable pattern, which makes the setting legible before anything is tasted. The cooking works in an Italian register: savory bites, small plates and an aperitivo hour that follows the Italian habit of a drink taken with something to eat. This is the porcelain house’s first restaurant anywhere, opened in 2024, and it behaves like a showroom that happens to serve lunch.

A room built out of the archive

The café sits inside the store rather than on the street, on The Beauty Level just past the beauty counters. Pink porcelain-inspired walls, Ginori wallpaper and fabric, and Italianate finishes carry the pattern off the plate and onto the surfaces. The scale is compact and the palette is colorful and playful by uptown standards, closer to an Italian drawing room than a department-store dining room. Italian hospitality and craftsmanship run through the space, the plates and the pacing in one visual language, and the effect is a full decorative intervention rather than a light branding overlay.

Order by the hour, not the dish

Choose the occasion first and let the menu follow. Lunch is the fullest version, Italian-inspired and served at the table with the porcelain doing half the work. Afternoon tea is the format the room flatters most, since the cups and the pattern are the point of the service. Aperitivo is the late move: a cocktail with savory bites, in the Italian tradition of a drink that arrives with food beside it rather than after it. Whichever hour you pick, the presentation is the throughline. The plate, the cup and the setting are part of the order rather than the packaging around it, and the four-menu structure means a second visit at a different hour is a genuinely different meal. Come once for lunch and once at aperitivo and you will have eaten off two different collections in the same room.