The Best Places to Eat in Milan

Scissors come with the pizza at this contemporary Milan pizzeria, which is either charming or alarming depending on how attached you are to tradition. The dough gets serious attention for structure and lift, and the menu runs across traditional, signature, and thin-and-crispy styles. Cocktail pairings are on the menu too, which feels very Milan about it. Listed among 50 Top Pizza Italy's Excellent Pizzerias.

1. 50 Top Pizza 50 Top Pizza Italy Excellent Pizzerias

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan

A bar with no kitchen and a small oven doing the heavy lifting, Bicchierino pulls off something quietly remarkable in the Giambellino neighborhood. The six-seat bar is usually buried in fresh flowers, and the handful of tables fills fast, so book ahead. Natural wines from France, Italy, and Spain anchor the list, with bottles available to take away. The food, given the constraints, reads like a flex: horse tartare, artichokes with preserved lemon, a roast beef sandwich with anchovy mayo.

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan

A working microwinery inside Milan's city limits that makes its own bottles rather than just selling other people's. The team draws grapes from Oltrepò Pavese, Valpolicella, and the slopes of Etna, then ages them in steel, amphorae, and wood. Charcuterie boards loaded with Lombard cheeses and salumi, plus cicchetti, cover the aperitivo side. Come for a glass; end up staying through dinner.

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan

A working vegetable garden fills the back of this canal-side restaurant on the quieter southern stretch of the Naviglio Pavese, where Milan loses its edge. The weekly tasting menu follows whatever the garden and season allow, shaped by a chef who grew up moving between France, the U.K., and the U.S. The crowd leans linen-and-natural-wine, which fits the radical-chic mood perfectly and without apparent irony.

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan

The name on the awning is Japanese, but the spirit is closer to a grandmother's kitchen than a sushi counter. This cozy restaurant near the Duomo was opened to serve the vegetables, curries, and donburi that Milan's many Japanese spots tend to skip entirely. The ka-ree and the potato salad with Japanese mayonnaise are the kind of things you don't realize you've been missing until they're in front of you.

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan

A chemist who became a baker is either a cautionary tale or a very good idea, and at Le Polveri it's the latter. This small all-day cafe and bread laboratory turns out laminated pastries, focaccia slicked with olive oil, and a short lunch menu built around whatever the team feels like baking that day. The coffee is serious, and the bread, spread thick with whipped butter and house jam, is the kind of thing people walk across neighborhoods for.

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan

A two-story food hall tucked inside Milan's main train station, with over 30 vendors covering everything from pizza al taglio to Chinese dumplings to Genovese farinata. Davide Longoni's bakery counter is worth seeking out, and Mag, the bar upstairs, is a sibling of Milan's celebrated speakeasy 1930. The kind of place where you can grab a cocktail and a slice of focaccia di Recco and call it a perfectly respectable lunch.

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan

Paper plates arrive loaded with beef cartilage and horse meat stew at this Porta Venezia osteria, where cucina povera is the whole point. Diego Rossi, the chef behind Trippa, runs a room built around offal, crostini, and natural wine, served from aperitivo hour until midnight. On weekends, the crowd from Via Melzo spills onto the pavement, which tells you something about how the neighborhood feels about the place.

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan

A family-run osteria near Centrale station where the cassoeula, that old Lombard pork-and-cabbage stew, arrives the same way it did for whoever ran this place before them. Workers fill the tables midweek; families crowd in on weekends for risotto Milanese and anchovies in salsa verde. Save room for the pistachio and hot pepper gelato, which sounds like a dare and isn't. On the way out, peer into the Liberty-style hall next door.

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan

Sit on the sixth floor of Fondazione Prada's tower building and you have Lucio Fontana on the walls, a triangular terrace for sunset drinks, and bread arriving from the storied Marchesi pasticceria. This is an upscale restaurant serving modern Milanese food and seafood with a Tuscan coastal lean. The crowd dresses accordingly, and the art-world adjacency keeps things from feeling stuffy, which is its own small miracle for a place this polished.

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan

A few blocks from the Duomo, this casual counter stop does one thing: pizza fritta, the Neapolitan fried-pizza tradition that never made it onto most Milan menus. The dough is long-fermented and cooked to order, arriving as a puffy, glossy pocket stuffed with salami, cicoli, or ricotta and provola di bufala. Grab extra napkins before you find a ledge to stand at, because the instruction to rip off the top and squeeze out the center is not a metaphor.

1. Eater The 37 Best Restaurants in Milan