28 Posti, Milan

Why you should experience 28 Posti in Milan, Italy.

28 Posti is an intimate contemporary restaurant where Navigli's canal-side creative culture meets Cristina Celestino's tactile interiors, a deliberately limited dining room and an exacting approach to Mediterranean cooking shaped through fermentation and preservation.

Set along Via Corsico near Alzaia Naviglio Grande and just steps from the canal, the restaurant occupies a narrow Navigli side street embedded within the former working quarter of boat traffic, workshops, courtyards and waterside trades. Cristina Celestino's 2020 redesign surrounds the compact dining room with raw-earth plaster by Matteo Brioni, Giulio Romano terracotta paneling from Fornace Brioni and a palette of natural wood, chalk white, muted blue and earthy burgundy. Original timber beams remain exposed overhead, and microperforated metal pendant lamps introduce a finer layer above the restrained tables. Twenty-eight seats preserve the scale announced by the restaurant's name, keeping diners physically close to the culinary work unfolding nearby. The result is a Navigli restaurant whose small dimensions and richly worked surfaces give ambitious contemporary cooking an unusually concentrated architectural setting.

What you should know about 28 Posti.

28 Posti is best known for Silvia Orazi and Gaetano Berni's decision to connect a Milan restaurant with the social work of Liveinslums, the NGO they helped establish, creating a project in 2013 that linked professional hospitality with people serving sentences at Bollate prison. Orazi and Berni worked with the prison on a construction program involving inmates eligible for employment outside the institution under Article 21; Liveinslums also established a woodworking workshop inside Bollate, and participants subsequently entered paid kitchen positions at the restaurant. Marco Ambrosino arrived in 2014 after growing up on Procida, beginning restaurant work at 14, spending four years at Libera Iovine's MICHELIN-starred Il Melograno on Ischia and completing a two-month stage at René Redzepi's Noma in Copenhagen in 2012. Those experiences gave Ambrosino a foundation for joining southern Italian ingredients with fermentation, acidity and preservation techniques, a direction that earned him 50 Top Italy's Premio per la Cucina Mediterranea in 2019. Franco Salvatore entered Ambrosino's brigade as an intern, rose through its ranks and was already working as chef de partie by 2017 before succeeding him as head chef when Ambrosino departed in 2022 after eight years. Andrea Zazzara subsequently joined Salvatore in the kitchen, bringing experience from Motelombroso, and the pair carried forward the restaurant's Mediterranean research through vegetables, fermentation and reduced waste. Salvatore now leads 28 Posti, preserving a direct line from Ambrosino's original brigade to the restaurant's current culinary phase more than a decade after Orazi and Berni began the project.

Tumminia wheat opens one route into Salvatore's cooking through house bread, whose dark Sicilian grain arrives with smoked butter and burnt onion. Buffalo tartare develops another through fig miso and cured egg yolk, placing raw meat beside the deep salinity of fermentation before grilled aubergine and tahini introduce smoke and sesame. Tagliatelle made with Tumminia wheat move into offal ragù, peach and rosemary, combining grain, organ meat, fruit and Mediterranean herbs within a single pasta preparation. Fermentation returns through homemade giardiniera and in techniques applied to vegetables, fruit and grain, joined elsewhere by smoking and precise temperature control. Umeboshi granita with chocolate namelaka pushes preserved acidity into dessert, setting a sharp frozen component against the smooth density of chocolate. Natural wines sourced through direct relationships with artisan growers accompany the blind tasting format, extending the restaurant's preference for small producers from the kitchen into the cellar.

How to fold 28 Posti into your trip.

28 Posti works as the dining anchor for an exploration of the Navigli that follows the district's transformation from commercial water infrastructure through specialized canal-side labor into one of Milan's most important surviving hydraulic landscapes.

Begin at Darsena, developed in 1603 under Spanish governor Pedro Enríquez de Acevedo, Count of Fuentes, when the earlier Sant'Eustorgio basin was transformed into a true city port beside the sixteenth-century walls. Naviglio Grande fed the basin and Naviglio Pavese later departed from it toward Pavia, turning the curved dock into the central junction of a waterborne freight network so substantial that Milan still ranked among Italy's major inland ports during the twentieth century. Continue to Vicolo dei Lavandai, where a surviving wash channel preserves the physical infrastructure of a trade organized by Milan's washermen through a confraternity dating to the eighteenth century. Water diverted from Naviglio Grande passed the stone washing stalls, workers knelt on wooden brellin, and laundry collected from prosperous households was cleaned with palton, a compound of ash, soap and soda; the washhouse remained active into the twentieth century. Conclude at Santa Maria delle Grazie al Naviglio, whose origins reach a chapel constructed beside the canal in 1556 to house a venerated image of the Virgin. Fire damaged the later Baroque church in 1719, parish status followed in 1849 and population growth prompted Gaetano Moretti to design a substantially larger replacement at the end of the nineteenth century, connecting centuries of waterside devotion with the district's urban expansion. The progression moves from the Darsena's transformation of Milanese waterways into a commercial port through Vicolo dei Lavandai's dependence on canal water for specialized labor into Santa Maria delle Grazie al Naviglio's repeated reconstruction beside the same working waterway, revealing how transport, trade and religious life developed around the Navigli.

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