Why you should experience Bacancíto Milano in Milan, Italy.
Bacancíto Milano is a convivial Iberian-Argentine restaurant where Porta Romana's independent dining culture meets Francesco Curti's years in Spain, Buenos Aires-inspired social rituals and Lorenzo Cassaro's cooking across the intertwined traditions of the Iberian Peninsula and Río de la Plata.
Set along Via Crema near Corso Lodi and just steps from Porta Romana, the restaurant occupies a southern Milan pocket where neighborhood restaurants and small food businesses extend outward from the sixteenth-century gateway into quieter residential streets. The intimate interior develops its Latin character through warm lighting, dark furnishings and decorative references to Argentine dining rooms, with an outdoor enclosure extending the compact footprint onto the street. Close-set tables reinforce the restaurant's sharing format, giving tapas, grilled meats and bottles of wine a natural place at the center of a group meal. Evening service expands into the BacanBar aperitivo format, shifting the room toward sangria, cocktails and small plates before dinner takes over. The result is a Porta Romana restaurant whose compact dimensions and communal table culture suit a culinary concept conceived around the social traditions connecting Spain and Argentina.
What you should know about Bacancíto Milano.
Bacancíto Milano is best known for Francesco Curti's decision to combine the Spanish restaurant culture he absorbed over fifteen years in Formentera with his longstanding fascination with Argentine beef and the culinary connections between two Latin traditions. Born in Milan to a family with Valtellina and Valchiavenna roots, Curti spent years working in hospitality in Italy and Spain before returning to Milan with the idea, opening Bacancíto on June 21, 2021. He chose a name derived from bacán, a Buenos Aires term associated with an elegant man devoted to good food, wine, parties and the buena vida, turning the word into the conceptual link between the restaurant's cooking and its social character. Chef Lorenzo Cassaro carried direct continuity from Curti's Spanish years, having worked beside him during those earlier experiences before leading the kitchen in Milan. Their partnership gave the restaurant a credible route between the two countries: Curti supplied the hospitality concept and cultural premise, and Cassaro translated that premise into cooking that crosses Iberian and Argentine traditions. The restaurant marked its third anniversary in 2024 with the Feria del Bacán, a three-month summer program organized around three tasting formats spanning its established repertoire, seasonal seafood and shared tapas. That same year, Gambero Rosso selected Bacancíto among its Milan addresses for meat, giving external recognition to the Argentine-grill component that had originally drawn Curti toward the project. BacanBar later extended the sharing premise into an aperitivo built around Spanish and Argentine small plates, sangria, wine and cocktails, carrying Curti's original idea from dinner into an earlier part of the evening.
Jamón de Bellota 100% Ibérico arrives after 40 months of curing and is sliced fresh by a cortador de jamón, pairing concentrated pork fat and salt with pan y tomate. Argentine beef enters through entraña, an intercostal cut suited to intense grilling, and through lomo paired with seared foie gras on montaditos, where soft bread absorbs the juices from both ingredients. Mollejas bring a distinctly Argentine offal tradition into smaller compositions, appearing with pickled red onion, avocado, aioli and lemon or grilled with a lemon glaze. Cassaro crosses the Atlantic again through croquettes filled with Jamón Ibérico, entraña or pluma Ibérica, using the crisp shell and béchamel center of the Spanish form to carry ingredients associated with both sides of the concept. A taco built around entraña adds grilled Padrón pepper, sautéed onions and paprika yogurt, and the seafood repertoire places raw Argentine prawn beside mozzarella di bufala or combines anchovies from the Cantabrian Sea with stracciatella and lemon. Sangria continues the same geographical movement through red, Cava-based white and rosé versions, the latter combining Cava, pink-grapefruit soda, tequila, Italicus and St-Germain for a floral, citrus-led finish.
How to fold Bacancíto Milano into your trip.
Bacancíto Milano works as the evening endpoint for an exploration of Porta Romana that follows the district from a ceremonial entrance built under Spanish rule through a rebellious twentieth-century theater project and an eighteenth-century burial complex created for Milan's principal hospital.
Begin at Porta Romana, completed in 1596 within Milan's Spanish fortifications for the arrival of Margaret of Austria, future queen consort of Philip III of Spain. The gate stood on the southeastern ceremonial route into the city and inherited a direction established by earlier Roman and medieval entrances toward the road to Rome, giving the surrounding district a name rooted in successive expansions of Milan's defensive perimeter. Continue to Teatro Franco Parenti, founded in 1972 as the Salone Pier Lombardo by Franco Parenti, Andrée Ruth Shammah, Giovanni Testori, Dante Isella and Gian Maurizio Fercioni inside the former third-run Cinema Continental. Performances began on January 16, 1973 with Testori's L'Ambleto; his subsequent Macbetto and Edipus, directed by Shammah and performed by Parenti, completed a trilogy that helped establish the theater nationally before it assumed Parenti's name after his death in 1989. Conclude at Rotonda della Besana, developed from 1695 as the Foppone dell'Ospedale Maggiore, a burial complex for the Ca' Granda whose central church and surrounding portico evolved through work associated with Attilio Arrigoni, Francesco Croce and Carlo Raffaello Raffagno. The cemetery closed after Austrian sanitary reforms moved burials beyond the city walls, and Luigi Cagnola later proposed converting it into a pantheon for the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy before the complex passed through uses including barracks, hay storage, hospital facilities and eventually a public cultural space. The progression moves from Porta Romana's Spanish ceremonial gateway through Parenti, Shammah and Testori's reinvention of a neighborhood cinema into an influential theater and the Besana's transformation from hospital cemetery through successive civic uses, tracing three distinct reinventions of the urban fabric surrounding the restaurant.
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