Why you should experience Cittamani in Milan, Italy.
Cittamani is a sophisticated Indian restaurant where Brera's cultivated historic quarter meets Ritu Dalmia's reversal of a career spent interpreting Italian cooking in India, regional Indian traditions and Paolo Cossu's meticulously restored Milanese interior.
Set along Piazza Carlo Mirabello near Via Solferino and just steps from Chiesa di San Marco, the restaurant occupies a secluded Brera pocket where former canal routes, publishing institutions and centuries of religious architecture converge north of the district's principal galleries. Paolo Cossu Architects retained the original terrazzo flooring and large glazed arches of the twentieth-century building, allowing the earlier architecture to remain visible beneath the intervention. Brass, marble, sucupira wood, leather and mirrors establish the principal finishes, joined by solid-brass lighting and stools custom designed by Cossu and produced by artisans in India. A specially developed brass-and-iron mesh resin treatment extends across tabletops and wall surfaces, connecting Indian fabrication with the restrained Milanese room. The result is a Brera restaurant whose restored architectural shell and purpose-made Indian craftsmanship establish a physical counterpart to Ritu Dalmia's movement between the two countries.
What you should know about Cittamani.
Cittamani is best known for completing an unusual culinary circle in Ritu Dalmia's career: after building her reputation by introducing serious Italian regional cooking to India, she opened the Milan restaurant in October 2017 to bring regional Indian cooking into Italy. Born in Calcutta to an entrepreneurial family, Dalmia entered the family stone business at sixteen, and repeated work trips to Italy exposed her to the cooking that redirected her career. At 21 she opened Mezza Luna, an Italian restaurant in Delhi; its closure led her to London and Vama, where she returned to Indian cooking before going home to establish DIVA in Delhi in 2000. Television widened that work through Italian Khana on NDTV Good Times, followed by the books Italian Khaana, Travelling DIVA and DIVA Green: A Vegetarian Cookbook. The Indian Federation of Culinary Associations named her among 25 leading Indian chefs in 2016, Forbes included her in its W-Power Trailblazers in 2017 and Italy conferred the Order of the Star of Italy upon her that September. Cittamani opened weeks later as her first Italian restaurant, created with entrepreneur Analjit Singh and conceived around Indian regional and community cooking; its name combines “Citta,” wisdom, with “Mani,” method, framing the restaurant as a route toward enlightenment. The Milan venture subsequently gave Dalmia a base for further expansion in the city, including the 2019 creation of Spica with chef Viviana Varese, turning Cittamani from the endpoint of her India-Italy exchange into the foundation of a broader Milanese chapter.
Pao bhaji begins with soft bread, vegetable curry and butter perfumed with curry leaves, preserving a preparation associated with Mumbai textile workers in a compact opening course. Kachori takes another route through puffed bread filled with burrata, tomato and mango chutney, placing an Italian dairy ingredient inside a snack associated with Marwari traders and pilgrims. Celeriac chaat chars Dalmia's favored root vegetable before adding yogurt and crisp crumble, concentrating the sweet, salty, sour and spiced contrasts central to chaat. Murg kali mirch moves into the tandoor with chicken marinated in yogurt, cream and cashew nuts, sharpened by black pepper and pickled onion; lamb chops use the same charcoal-fired equipment with mustard-spiced potatoes and vegetables. Chicken biryani encloses Lucknow-style spiced rice and marinated chicken beneath puff pastry, accompanied by dal and raita, and Chettiar duck pairs seared breast with millet upma and a sauce driven by the spice traditions of Tamil Nadu. Paneer pasanda finishes the sequence through walnut-filled fresh cheese, tomato preparations and almond chutney, demonstrating how Cittamani travels through Indian regions and communities through distinct techniques, grains, breads, spice combinations and cooking traditions.
How to fold Cittamani into your trip.
Cittamani works as the dining endpoint for an afternoon through northern Brera that follows the district from an Augustinian religious center through the institutional reinvention of Palazzo Brera and into the half-century effort to extend its art collections into an adjoining eighteenth-century residence.
Begin at Chiesa di San Marco, where Augustinian prior general Lanfranco Settala established a three-nave church in 1254 on a site traditionally associated with Milan's alliance with Venice against Frederick Barbarossa. The Augustinians made San Marco one of their principal Milanese centers; Mozart lived in its monastery for three months in 1770, and Giuseppe Verdi conducted the first performance of his Messa da Requiem there in 1874 to commemorate Alessandro Manzoni. Continue to Pinacoteca di Brera, whose palace grew from a fourteenth-century Umiliati monastery transferred to the Jesuits and substantially rebuilt by Francesco Maria Richini during the seventeenth century. Suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 placed the complex under state control; Maria Theresa of Austria established cultural institutions there, Giuseppe Piermarini completed major architectural work and Napoleon's government formally created the Pinacoteca in 1809 to receive paintings gathered from territories under French rule. Conclude at Palazzo Citterio, the eighteenth-century residence acquired by the state in 1972 after Pinacoteca director Franco Russoli conceived it as the centerpiece of his Grande Brera expansion. James Stirling produced a later museum proposal, decades of interrupted work followed, and a new intervention led by Mario Cucinella finally preceded the palace's public opening in December 2024 with the Jesi, Jucker, Mattioli and Vitali collections extending Brera into twentieth-century art. The progression moves from San Marco's medieval Augustinian foundation through the state-directed transformation of Palazzo Brera into an academy and museum into Palazzo Citterio's long-delayed realization of Franco Russoli's Grande Brera, tracing nearly eight centuries of cultural institution-building around Cittamani.
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