Why you should experience Kanji Centrale in Milan, Italy.
Kanji Centrale is a spirited Japanese-fusion restaurant where Centrale's international character meets Jay Lin's family apprenticeship in sushi, transformed into the first chapter of a Milanese restaurant group that has spent more than fifteen years pushing the all-you-can-eat format through original rolls, house sauces and cross-cultural combinations.
Set along Via Aminto Caretto near Via Fabio Filzi and just steps from Milano Centrale, the restaurant occupies a dense station district where hotels, offices and international kitchens converge across blocks rebuilt around Milan's principal railway gateway. Exposed brick arches, warm lighting and contemporary furnishings give the dining room a polished scale, balancing the building's older fabric with a modern sushi setting. Plates arrive in rapid succession across a format suited to exploring raw fish, fried preparations, grilled dishes and more elaborate rolls during the same meal. The visual range intensifies as fruit, sauces, crisp garnishes and seared seafood move across otherwise restrained table settings. The result is a Centrale restaurant whose long-running fusion approach carries Jay Lin's first independent project into the contemporary dining culture surrounding the station.
What you should know about Kanji Centrale.
Kanji Centrale is best known for Jay Lin's path from a young immigrant working in his father Akan Lin's restaurant to the first brand in a restaurant network spanning several distinct Asian formats. Born in Wenzhou in 1986, Lin followed his father to Italy as a teenager after Akan had arrived in 1998 and established himself as a chef and one of Milan's early sushi specialists. Jay combined his studies with service work at the family restaurant, then learned sushi behind his father's counter and participated with him in developing menus. He opened his first Kanji near Centrale in 2009, with the concept entering its established public chapter in 2010, and treated the restaurant as a laboratory for original sauces and Japanese-fusion combinations. Expansion followed through Kanji Evo in 2013 and Kanji Light in 2015, creating three Milanese branches under Lin before later consolidation returned the brand to a smaller footprint. His experimentation also moved beyond conventional sushi: Fusho developed around sushi burritos, and Lin learned ramen production from a Japanese practitioner in 2017 before acquiring Italian exclusivity for Ramen Shifu in 2020 with an Italian partner. La Gyozeria added another specialist concept, concentrating on handmade dumplings and Asian street food. By 2025 Lin and his partners had built a network of sixteen restaurants across Kanji, Fusho, Ramen Shifu and La Gyozeria employing 160 people, with Kanji entering a rebranding cycle after fifteen years. The original Centrale project consequently stands at the beginning of a founder journey extending from Akan Lin's sushi counter through Jay's first independent restaurant into a multibrand group built across several Asian culinary traditions.
Kanji's contemporary repertoire is strongest where Japanese sushi structures become foundations for ingredients drawn from farther afield. Hasu Roll surrounds tempura prawn with seared tuna, burrata, truffle cream, chives and teriyaki, shifting between crisp shellfish, warm fish and soft dairy in a single construction. Huanca Roll takes tempura prawn in another direction through crisp sweet potato and huancaína, bringing the Peruvian sauce of pepper and fresh cheese into an uramaki format. Mexican Salmon layers avocado beneath salmon tartare, chopped jalapeño, nachos and teriyaki, using heat and crunch to alter the texture of the raw fish. Isho Amazon joins salmon, Argentine prawn, avocado and mango with passion-fruit sauce and green oil, placing fruit acidity against two seafood textures. Black Tartare builds salmon tartare over Venere rice beneath kataifi, teriyaki and spicy mayonnaise, and the dedicated black-rice uramaki collection extends that grain into another branch of the sushi selection. Gamberi Scottati moves into the hot kitchen through Argentine prawns, almonds, apricot, lemongrass, soy, potato starch, obulato and dark chocolate. Low-temperature duck breast with balsamic-soy glaze closes the savory range through a technique and ingredient combination far removed from raw-fish preparation, demonstrating how extensively Kanji has widened the style surrounding its sushi foundation.
How to fold Kanji Centrale into your trip.
Kanji Centrale works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing Milan's vertical ambitions from the first postwar tower to break the Madonnina height barrier through a twenty-first-century government complex and into the preservation of the station infrastructure used for Holocaust deportations.
Begin at Torre Breda, where Luigi Mattioni and brothers Eugenio and Ermenegildo Soncini won a 1950 invited competition for a skyscraper on former railway land shaped by the 1934 Albertini plan. Completed in 1954 at 116 meters, the reinforced-concrete tower became Milan's first building to rise above the Madonnina and Italy's tallest building at completion; its mixed program placed offices in the lower structure and residences above, turning the project into an early statement of postwar high-rise living. Continue to Palazzo Lombardia, selected through an international competition won by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners with Caputo Partnership and Sistema Duemila and completed in 2010. Its 161-meter tower surpassed the nearby Pirelli building during construction in 2009, and the complex joined curving office strands around Piazza Città di Lombardia with a double-skin climate wall, groundwater heat pumps and integrated photovoltaic technology, carrying Milanese high-rise experimentation into a new generation of environmental engineering. Conclude at Memoriale della Shoah di Milano, built around the concealed loading area beneath Milano Centrale from which thousands of Jews and political prisoners were deported between 1943 and 1945. Guido Morpurgo and Annalisa de Curtis developed the memorial project during the 2000s around Binario 21 and its surviving railway infrastructure, preserving the machinery and freight spaces connected with transports that included Liliana Segre's January 30, 1944 deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The progression moves from Mattioni and the Soncini brothers' challenge to Milan's historic height limit through Pei Cobb Freed, Caputo Partnership and Sistema Duemila's technologically advanced regional headquarters into Morpurgo and de Curtis's preservation of the deportation infrastructure beneath Centrale, tracing architectural ambition, engineering change and historical memory through the station district.
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