Why you should experience Dim Sum in Milan, Italy.
Dim Sum is a polished Chinese restaurant where Porta Venezia's concentration of Liberty architecture meets Yike Weng and Chiara Wang Pei's contemporary interpretation of Hong Kong's yum cha tradition, Carlo Samarati's theatrical interiors and a dining format that pairs handmade Cantonese bites with Champagne.
Set along Via Nino Bixio near Via Carlo Pisacane and just steps from the Liberty residences lining the surrounding blocks, the restaurant occupies a Porta Venezia pocket where early-twentieth-century decorative architecture forms one of Milan's richest residential ensembles. Carlo Samarati conceived the interior through linear furnishings, chain-covered mirrors that resemble drifting smoke and electric-blue illumination drawn from the twilight colors of Shanghai and Hong Kong. A raised blue volume encloses the partially visible kitchen at the center, placing the cooks and rising steam within the visual composition of the dining room. Bamboo steamers arrive against this dark, controlled backdrop, turning small-format dishes into concentrated points of color across the tables. The result is a Porta Venezia restaurant where Samarati's blue-lit design gives an old Cantonese dining ritual a distinctly metropolitan Milanese stage.
What you should know about Dim Sum.
Dim Sum is best known for Yike Weng and Chiara Wang Pei's decision to develop a restaurant devoted specifically to the Cantonese dim sum ritual after their earlier work helped establish Bon Wei as a serious address for regional Chinese cooking in Milan. Both entrepreneurs came from Zhejiang, and Weng had already managed Kyoto, among Milan's early successful Japanese restaurants run by Chinese restaurateurs, before meeting chef Zhang Guoqing in Padua and joining him in the 2010 creation of Bon Wei. That restaurant gave the partners a platform for Chinese haute cuisine, yet Weng and Wang Pei deliberately avoided duplicating it when they opened Dim Sum in December 2013 with Zhang as chef-partner. Their initial repertoire contained four classic dumplings and relied on a chef from Singapore; within six months the founders concluded that the restaurant needed its own culinary direction, eventually expanding to more than twenty dumpling variations supported by separate specialists for dumplings and wok cooking. The reinterpretation also changed the traditional beverage ritual by replacing the customary tea accompaniment with Perrier-Jouët Champagne, making Dim Sum the first Asian maison reconnue in Italy for the Champagne house. Weng subsequently explained the restaurant as the more innovative counterpart to Bon Wei: traditional preparation remained the foundation, yet fillings and ingredients moved into new combinations suited to the specialized format. MICHELIN recognition placed the restaurant within the guide's Milan selection for its Cantonese and southern Chinese cooking, completing a development that began with the founders' earlier regional restaurant and evolved into a focused treatment of one of southern China's defining communal meal traditions.
Har gow place translucent wrappers around prawn filling, using steaming to set the thin dough. Shao mai leave their upper surface open, producing a different balance between wrapper and filling before xiao long bao introduce broth held inside pleated dough and released when the parcel is opened. Scallop dumplings push seafood toward a sweeter register, and Chianina beef filling brings an Italian breed into a form governed by Chinese dough and steaming technique. Crispy duck moves away from the bamboo basket through roasted meat, brittle skin and thin pancakes, with vegetables and sauce supplying freshness and contrast. Imperial pork ribs and beef with fermented soy sauce deepen the meal through richer marinades and wok cooking, extending the kitchen beyond its dumpling specialists. Perrier-Jouët Champagne cuts through steamed dough, rendered fat and fermented sauces with acidity and carbonation, giving the founders' most unconventional departure from yum cha a practical role across the meal.
How to fold Dim Sum into your trip.
Dim Sum works as the dining endpoint for an architectural walk through Porta Venezia that follows Milanese residential design from floral Liberty experimentation into the eclecticism preceding the First World War and the technologically advanced private villas of the 1930s.
Begin at Casa Campanini, the Via Carlo Pisacane residence traditionally attributed to Alfredo Campanini and dated to 1905, created during the architect's intense experimentation with Milanese Liberty. Its sinuous treatment drew connections with Victor Horta's Belgian Art Nouveau, placing an international architectural current inside the residential expansion of the streets immediately surrounding the restaurant and extending Campanini's work beyond the better-known family house he designed on Via Bellini during the same period. Continue to Palazzo Berri Meregalli, constructed by Giulio Ulisse Arata between 1911 and 1913 for the Berri Meregalli family, where exposed brick, stone arches, Gothic references, floral decoration and geometric mosaics converge across an intentionally eclectic composition. Angiolo D'Andrea and Adamo Rimoldi contributed painted decoration and mosaics, and Adolfo Wildt added the gilded marble Vittoria Alata in 1919 to commemorate the end of the First World War, carrying the building's artistic program beyond its original construction. Conclude at Villa Necchi Campiglio, designed by Piero Portaluppi between 1932 and 1935 for sisters Nedda and Gigina Necchi and Gigina's husband Angelo Campiglio on land carved from the former Serbelloni garden. Portaluppi gave the industrial family a rigorously modern residence, then Tomaso Buzzi began reshaping portions of the interiors from 1938, introducing a more decorative counterpoint to the original conception; the property later entered FAI stewardship and became part of Milan's house-museum circuit. The progression moves from Campanini's early Liberty experimentation through Arata's collaboration with painters and sculptors at Palazzo Berri Meregalli into Portaluppi and Buzzi's successive interventions at Villa Necchi Campiglio, tracing three decades of changing Milanese residential design around Dim Sum.
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