Cantina Italian Kitchen is a neighbourhood wine bar and trattoria on Ari Samphan Soi 3, built around a sommelier-curated list that runs to more than 60 labels stacked in a two-story rack that dominates the room. Co-owner Mathew Milotich runs the wine program, and the selection leans heavily Italian with bottles drawn from the usual Piedmont and Tuscany producers alongside quieter picks from Friuli and over the border into Slovenia. Glass pours start at B250, bottles from B950, so the list reads as a working wine bar rather than a cellar to gawk at.
The space takes its cue from subterranean Italian cellars, low-lit and warm, with a wood oven at the back of the kitchen turning out thin-crust pizzas and a menu of pastas, antipasti and grilled steaks built to drink with. Sundays bring live acoustic music from 7 to 9 PM, and the calendar rotates between opera nights, seasonal tastings led by the sommelier and occasional DJ sets. It reads like an Italian wine bar in Ari, Bangkok that regulars treat as a second living room.
You come up Ari Samphan Soi 3 and step into a room dominated by that double-height wine rack, with a bar running alongside and tables tucked between. The crowd is mostly neighbourhood: Ari residents, a few expats who have made this their regular, couples in for a bottle and a pizza rather than a full tasting menu. Service is unhurried. If you ask, Mathew or one of the team will walk you through the list, usually starting with what you normally drink and steering you toward a Slovenian or Friulian bottle you have not tried. Expect to spend two or three hours. Kitchen runs from 5 to 11 PM every night, and the last pours stretch past that when the room is full.
The wine list is the reason to come. Sixty-plus labels spanning white, red, rose and sparkling, weighted toward Italian producers with a handful of unexpected bottles including an Edi Simcic Giocato Merlot from Slovenia that the sommelier pours by the glass. From the bar, the Negroni Shakerato is the house pick, gin, Campari and sweet vermouth shaken hard over ice and strained into a coupe at B280, a colder sharper cousin of the stirred version. Out of the wood oven, the Diavola pizza is the order most tables end up with, thin Neapolitan-style base with spicy salami, and the burrata with tomatoes and basil sits on most tables as a starter built to drink alongside a glass of something white.
Cantina sits on Ari Samphan Soi 3, a quiet residential lane running off Rama VI Road in the Ari district of Phaya Thai. It is about a five-minute walk from BTS Ari, south of the station along the soi network that connects Ari to Saphan Khwai, and easy enough to find by taxi using the Rama VI Soi 30 address.
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