Il Caffé

Coffee at the bar, Roman lunch at the table, afternoon tea later: Il Caffè runs the whole day from the ground floor of Bvlgari Hotel Roma, under a Niko Romito concept rather than the quick counter rhythm of a street espresso bar.

An all-day caffè with a chef behind it

Il Caffè is the Bvlgari-branded caffè inside Bvlgari Hotel Roma, the first of its kind in Italy and the first created by Niko Romito. That connection sets the register. The service periods are formal rather than improvised, and the caffè sits closer to a hotel dining room keeping café hours than to a neighbourhood bar where an espresso is drunk standing up.

The day is divided into distinct moments. Coffee is part of the offer, but so are breakfast, traditional Roman lunch, Sunday brunch and afternoon tea, each with its own menu. A separate Bvlgari menu sits alongside the breakfast and afternoon tea cards, which is the clearest sign that the caffè is organised around occasions rather than around a single cup.

Porticos, planters and a Roman square

The strongest reason to choose it is the setting. The caffè occupies the hotel’s ground floor and spreads into a spacious outdoor area beneath the monumental porticos of Piazza Augusto Imperatore, one of the more theatrical addresses in central Rome. Large planters filled with flowers and native greenery soften that architecture and give the terrace a landscaped feel inside a major square.

The atmosphere reads as relaxed, but everything around it is deliberate: the Bvlgari house style, the Romito-created concept, the structured menus, the place of the caffè within the hotel’s wider dining portfolio. It is a room designed to look easy, and the outdoor tables are the version of it most people will remember.

How to use it across the day

Treat the format as the guide. Coffee or breakfast early, traditional Roman lunch as the midday anchor, afternoon tea in the late afternoon, brunch on Sunday. Each of those is a different room in practice, because the menu, the pacing and the crowd change with them.

The pleasure is the combination of a monumental outdoor setting and kitchen work that follows a chef’s structure, so a visit is better planned around one of those service periods than dropped into at random. Choose it when the priority is a polished Roman pause with the porticos overhead, and let the menu that matches the hour do the rest.