Why you should experience Cactus Milano in Milan, Italy.
Cactus Milano is an inventive restaurant where Moscova's historic passage between Brera and Porta Volta meets Alessio Sebastiani's vegetable-and-sea cooking, Eva Galimberti's dedicated pastry program and a two-level concept developed around seasonality and ecological restraint.
Set along Via Varese near Via Alessandro Volta and just steps from Largo La Foppa, the restaurant occupies a Moscova pocket shaped by the old route toward Porta Comasina, surviving religious complexes and the tightly layered streets connecting Brera with the former city walls. More than 400 square meters originally unfolded across a street-level restaurant and lower lounge, establishing distinct environments for daytime dining and evening drinks. A hydroponic greenhouse now anchors the green interior concept, carrying living cultivation into a setting organized around plants, restrained finishes and a seasonal outdoor area. The 2024 reconstruction absorbed an adjoining former restaurant space and gave pastry a substantially larger physical presence, with the bar and dining areas more clearly separated yet connected. The result is a Moscova restaurant whose changing architecture follows an all-day format that moves through breakfast, lunch, pastry, aperitivo and dinner without surrendering its central emphasis on plant life.
What you should know about Cactus Milano.
Cactus Milano is best known for chef and co-founder Alessio Sebastiani's development of a predominantly vegetable-driven restaurant into a broader culinary project spanning seafood, pastry and mixology. Born in 1990, Sebastiani reached the opening after professional experience across Europe, England and the United States, including work connected with international, creative and fusion restaurants, then launched Cactus Kitchen & Bar in 2022 with a young team and a kitchen centered on seasonal produce. The original format divided its functions vertically: Sebastiani directed the restaurant upstairs, and bar manager Giorgio Riva ran the lower secret bar, whose early signature drinks were developed with Milan cocktail institution Mag. Pastry chef Eva Galimberti worked beside Sebastiani from the opening and brought an equally unconventional professional route to the project: born in Catania in 1992 with Italian-German roots, she moved to Milan to study economics at Bocconi, abandoned the degree five examinations before completion and pursued pastry through Mudec, Sicilian pastry specialist Ammu and chocolatier Charlotte Dusart. The restaurant underwent a substantial reconstruction in November 2024 and emerged under the shortened Cactus Milano name, with Galimberti's work elevated from a small pastry corner into a dedicated Pastry Lab and the adjoining former Lievità premises incorporated into the operation. Galimberti subsequently expanded production across French viennoiserie, cakes, pralines, macarons and mignon, with her laboratory also accepting commissioned cakes and producing fresh croissants. Riva remained responsible for cocktails as the redesigned operation clarified the distinction between pastry, restaurant and bar, completing a project in which three specialists developed separate disciplines from the original Cactus Kitchen & Bar foundation.
Sebastiani's Orto di Cactus places fifteen seasonal vegetables into a single composition, changing cooking methods and textures across crisp, soft, acidic and sweeter components so the vegetable itself carries the dish. Fiori di zucchina develop the plant-focused repertoire through stuffed blossoms, and his Fregola di Mare Sottosopra moves toward seafood through Sardinian pasta and marine flavors. Market Fish shifts with the daily catch and permits raw and cooked preparations to follow the fish available that day. Galimberti's Dolce Bosco Magico enters darker territory through porcini-shaped elements, hazelnut, rosemary “moss,” red-currant gel and truffle gelato, assembling woodland flavors inside a dessert with deliberately restrained sweetness. Her millefoglie combines apricot panna cotta, 70-percent dark-chocolate cream, osmotically treated apricots and apricot gel, repeating the fruit through several textures before the bitterness of chocolate interrupts it. Riva completes the sequence through seasonal mixed drinks, continuing an approach established by his pumpkin Daiquiri and carried into the current lounge through handcrafted cocktails.
How to fold Cactus Milano into your trip.
Cactus Milano works as the dining endpoint for an afternoon tracing Moscova through a late-antique basilica, a Sforza-era double church and Napoleon's conversion of the Castello margins into a vast civic performance zone.
Begin at Basilica di San Simpliciano, whose origins reach the late fourth or early fifth century and the early Christian building traditionally connected with Bishop Ambrose's Basilica Virginum. Romanesque reconstruction during the eleventh and twelfth centuries inserted masonry vaults, new supports, an octagonal tiburium and a reduced apse into the ancient structure; Ambrogio da Fossano, known as Bergognone, later painted the apse with the Coronation of the Virgin in 1508, adding a major Renaissance intervention to a building carrying more than a millennium of architectural change. Continue to Santa Maria Incoronata, where Francesco Sforza's 1451 support for the Augustinian community was followed by Bianca Maria Visconti's commission of a second church dedicated to San Nicola da Tolentino beside the existing structure. The two were joined during the fifteenth century into the unusual twin-nave building visible now, and the adjoining convent developed a painted library whose surviving decoration includes the radiant sun of Saint Augustine and representations of the Fathers of the Church. Conclude at Arena Civica Gianni Brera, commissioned during the Napoleonic remaking of the Castello district and designed by Luigi Canonica with Rome's Circus Maximus as a precedent. Construction began in 1806 and the amphitheater opened in Napoleon's presence on August 18, 1807; Milan acquired it in 1870, sporting use expanded around the turn of the twentieth century and the arena received Gianni Brera's name in 2002. The progression moves from San Simpliciano's absorption of early Christian, Romanesque and Renaissance interventions through the Sforza patronage that joined two churches at Santa Maria Incoronata into Canonica's Napoleonic amphitheater, compressing radically different eras of Milanese architecture into the streets surrounding Moscova.
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