Why you should experience Ristorante Acanto in Milan, Italy.
Ristorante Acanto is a sophisticated Italian restaurant where Piazza della Repubblica's grand-hotel history, Matteo Gabrielli's Lombard foundations, international culinary training and contemporary treatment of regional classics converge inside the Hotel Principe di Savoia.
Set along Piazza della Repubblica near Via Vittor Pisani and just steps from Giardini Indro Montanelli, the restaurant occupies the garden-facing side of a hotel conceived by Cesare Tenca and opened in 1927, surrounded by the broad planted center of the piazza, the grand residential blocks erected after Milan's former central station disappeared and the long perspective running toward Milano Centrale. Acanto opens onto an Italian-style garden, and a show kitchen brings the brigade into view beneath an interior of chandeliers, glass, marble and velvet. Gabrielli uses that composed setting for Italian cooking grounded in Lombard tradition, carrying familiar preparations through precise changes in acidity, smoke, fermentation, fruit and texture. The result is a restaurant where nearly a century of grand-hotel culture provides the setting for a young Lombard chef whose career has moved through London, Tuscany and Milan before returning to the regional cooking of his birthplace.
What you should know about Ristorante Acanto.
Ristorante Acanto is best known for Matteo Gabrielli's rise from five formative years abroad through acclaimed European kitchens into leadership of the restaurant he first joined as sous chef in 2019. Born in the province of Varese, Gabrielli began his international development in London, working at Four Seasons Hotel London at Park Lane with Adriano Cavagnini before moving into Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park. His London years brought him into Heston Blumenthal's kitchen, exposing the young chef to the methods of one of Britain's most technically influential three-MICHELIN-starred restaurateurs. Gabrielli returned to Italy after five years abroad and worked with Antonio Guida at Il Pellicano in Porto Ercole, then joined Vito Mollica during his tenure at Four Seasons Hotel Milano. Hotel Principe di Savoia brought Gabrielli into its brigade in 2019 as sous chef, beginning four years of development inside the property before he accepted leadership of Acanto at the end of 2023. His appointment was announced in March 2024 when Gabrielli was thirty-three, placing a chef raised in Lombardy at the head of the hotel's principal restaurant. Acanto itself entered its twentieth year in 2026, with Fabrizio Cadei recognized as its first chef and pastry chef Beniamino Passannante joining Gabrielli among the three culinary figures selected by the hotel to mark that anniversary. Gabrielli has since opened his kitchen to MICHELIN-starred collaborators including Fabio Pisani and Salvatore Bianco, pairing the latter dinner with Franciacorta selections chosen by head sommelier Mara Vicelli. Tavolo Cristallo extends Acanto into private dining through a room created with Stefano Ricci Home and Luxury Living, Swarovski crystal panels and designer Celeste Dell'Anna, where Gabrielli develops bespoke menus around wines selected by the sommelier.
Gabrielli's current tasting menu begins with chickpea farinata, baked ricotta, baby vegetables, sweet-and-sour turnips and vegetable broth, establishing Italian familiarity through vegetable sweetness and acidity. Pink-shrimp tartare follows with balsamic strawberries, Virgin Mary and basil pearls, bringing fruit and tomato into the raw crustacean before pasta deepens the marine flavors. Ravioli filled with pappa al pomodoro meet raw seafood, black lemon and reduced bisque, placing a Tuscan bread-and-tomato preparation inside filled pasta with concentrated shellfish. Sea bass arrives with buttered potatoes, Mediterranean chopped tomatoes and mussels, returning the sequence to recognizable coastal ingredients through direct fish cookery. Rossini-style veal cheek changes the register through saffron brioche, foie gras and chicken-gizzard sauce, carrying a classical preparation into a richer final savory course. The wider menu pushes the same approach through caper-and-lime risotto with garusoli in scapece, sole filled with prawns and salted-lemon marmalade, Irish lamb smoked through two cooking stages and duck beneath a peperone crusco crust. Acanto tiramisù completes the tasting menu through the restaurant's own treatment of the Italian dessert, closing a meal that repeatedly starts with established Italian preparations and changes their structure through Gabrielli's international technical development.
How to fold Ristorante Acanto into your trip.
Ristorante Acanto works as the dining anchor for an afternoon following three generations of Milanese architecture, landscape design and scientific patronage immediately east of Piazza della Repubblica.
Begin at Giardini Indro Montanelli, created as Milan's first public garden after Viceroy Ferdinand of Habsburg acquired former monastic land and entrusted Giuseppe Piermarini with a French-style composition of geometric beds and tree-lined avenues inaugurated in 1794. Giuseppe Balzaretto reshaped the grounds during the nineteenth century through an English-style landscape of clearings, water and artificial rock formations before Emilio Alemagna intervened after the exhibitions held there between 1871 and 1881, leaving three major designers legible across the park's development. Continue to Galleria d'Arte Moderna, housed inside Villa Belgiojoso, commissioned in 1790 by Count Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso and designed by Leopoldo Pollack after the project passed from his mentor Piermarini. The villa became Napoleon's Milanese residence in 1804, entered the Italian Crown after unification and began housing Milan's modern-art collection in 1921, connecting aristocratic patronage, French rule and public collecting within one neoclassical residence. Conclude at Planetario Ulrico Hoepli, where publisher Ulrico Hoepli financed a new astronomical institution and Piero Portaluppi designed an octagonal building beneath a hemispherical dome, working with Brera Observatory director Emilio Bianchi and technical specialist Ernst before its inauguration on May 20, 1930. The first year brought 109 lectures and 23,508 attendees; during the 1943 bombing of Milan, custodian Aldo Venturi saved the projection apparatus by secretly dismantling it and hiding it inside a church in Limbiate. The progression moves from Piermarini, Balzaretto and Alemagna's successive remaking of Milan's first public garden through Pollack's neoclassical Villa Belgiojoso into Hoepli, Bianchi, Portaluppi and Venturi's architectural and scientific history at Planetario Ulrico Hoepli.
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