Why you should experience Nori Way in Milan, Italy.
Nori Way is a boundary-pushing Japanese restaurant where Portanuova's contemporary architectural district, Roman Touliganov's search for a plant-based sushi format capable of attracting omnivores, Radicetonda's decade of vegan experimentation and chef Tenzin Jigme's Tibetan-led kitchen converge through Italy's first fully plant-based sushi restaurant.
Set along Via Federico Confalonieri beneath the Bosco Verticale, the restaurant occupies a new Portanuova home after developing its following inside Radicetonda's Piazza Bruno Buozzi premises in Porta Romana. The move places Nori Way within one of Milan's most concentrated contemporary design districts, with an understated dining room and veranda opening toward the vertical forest that helped redefine the surrounding skyline. The setting gives a concept originally developed as a nighttime restaurant-within-a-restaurant an independent stage, matching its evolution from an experimental Radicetonda project into a standalone operation with Touliganov serving as founder and chief executive. The result is a restaurant whose current polish carries forward a much more unusual founding journey, joining Milanese vegan entrepreneurship, Touliganov's study of plant-based restaurants abroad and Jigme's Asian culinary direction beneath one of the city's defining works of contemporary architecture.
What you should know about Nori Way.
Nori Way is best known for Roman Touliganov joining Guido Fornaro, Guido Giansoldati and Lorenzo Cannavale of Radicetonda to create the first fully plant-based sushi restaurant in Italy, building the concept around a problem Touliganov had investigated in Berlin and Barcelona. Radicetonda supplied an unusually mature foundation for the experiment: Fornaro, Giansoldati and Cannavale had established their first Milanese restaurant in 2012 as Italy's first exclusively plant-based restaurant with ICEA organic credentials, then added a second location in Piazza Bruno Buozzi in 2015. Touliganov studied vegan restaurants in Berlin and Barcelona before developing Nori Way, using those trips to determine that a successful concept needed to interest omnivorous diners as strongly as committed vegans. The project occupied Radicetonda's Piazza Buozzi dining room at night, converting a daytime vegan bistrot into a dedicated Japanese operation five evenings each week and giving the founders a way to test the format. Touliganov worked with a brigade of Tibetan cooks coordinated by chef Tenzin Jigme, whose task was to preserve recognizable Asian flavor profiles entirely through plant-derived ingredients. That culinary structure gave Nori Way a distinctive founding combination: Russian-named entrepreneur Touliganov directing the concept, three established Milanese vegan restaurateurs supplying the operating foundation and a Tibetan-led brigade interpreting Japanese food. Vogue Italia profiled the restaurant soon after its debut and identified Touliganov as the mind behind the project, bringing national fashion-media attention to an operation that had begun inside another restaurant. Forbes Italia subsequently featured Nori Way among its Milan dining selections, extending recognition of the concept beyond specialist vegan media. Touliganov's role expanded with the business, and by 2026 the Italian Federation of Public Establishments presented him as Nori Way's founder and CEO during its Light & Gusto industry discussion on changing restaurant demand. His appearance placed the restaurant alongside FIPE, AILI and food-service professionals in a national discussion of plant-based dining, with Touliganov explaining that the team had detected strong latent demand and engineered the operation around an entirely vegetable Japanese format. Nori Way then left Piazza Buozzi for its independent Via Federico Confalonieri restaurant beneath Bosco Verticale, completing the transition from a nighttime experiment within Radicetonda into a standalone brand in Portanuova.
Marination and fermentation provide the technical foundation for translating sushi into an entirely vegetable repertoire, allowing ingredients built from water, tapioca and potato starch to take on the flavor profiles and textures associated with salmon, tuna and prawn. Chef Tenzin Jigme's team developed these substitutes through dedicated marinades, preserving the recognizable construction of nigiri, uramaki, gunkan and tartare across preparations containing no animal products. Rice, nori and familiar Japanese formats give those transformed ingredients a precise structural reference, allowing texture to become as important as visual resemblance. Vegetable preparations widen the repertoire through tempura, gyoza, ramen and udon, moving the kitchen beyond imitation seafood and into cooked forms with their own temperature and textural contrasts. Fermented elements introduce acidity and depth across the plant-based program, and careful knife work gives vegetables the proportions expected within sushi construction. The restaurant's broader purpose emerges through that technical discipline: Touliganov wanted the food to attract diners across dietary preferences, requiring each preparation to stand on flavor, texture and construction without relying on veganism as its principal attraction.
How to fold Nori Way into your trip.
Nori Way works as the meal stop for an afternoon tracing Portanuova through a civic institution dedicated to Milan's twentieth-century memory, an internationally commissioned botanical park and the residential towers that carried Stefano Boeri's experiments with architecture and vegetation into global design culture.
Begin at Casa della Memoria, where Milan's municipal government decided in 2010 to create a permanent home for organizations preserving the histories of the Resistance, Nazi deportation, terrorism and the massacres of the later twentieth century. Baukuh won the under-40 architectural competition in 2011, completed the building between 2013 and 2015 and covered its brick elevations with large pixelated portraits and historical scenes before the institution opened on April 24, 2015, one day before the seventieth anniversary of Liberation. Continue to Biblioteca degli Alberi, whose creation began with the international competition won by Dutch studio Inside Outside | Petra Blaisse in 2004 and passed through Agnes Denes's five-hectare Wheatfield installation during Expo 2015 before the public park opened in 2018. Its nine hectares organize paths, themed gardens, lawns and circular forests into a contemporary botanical composition now managed by Fondazione Riccardo Catella, connecting landscape architecture with the redevelopment that reshaped Portanuova. Conclude at Bosco Verticale, where Stefano Boeri Architetti developed two residential towers completed in 2014 with engineering by Arup and botanical consultancy involving Laura Gatti and Emanuela Borio, distributing hundreds of trees and thousands of shrubs and plants across projecting balconies. The project received the International Highrise Award in 2014 and CTBUH's Best Tall Building Worldwide in 2015, turning an experiment in integrating living vegetation with high-rise housing into one of Milan's most internationally recognized architectural projects. The progression moves from Baukuh's architecture of twentieth-century civic memory through Petra Blaisse and Agnes Denes's transformation of former redevelopment ground into a botanical public realm and culminates with Boeri's vertical forest, revealing how institutions, landscape and experimental architecture reshaped the territory surrounding Nori Way.
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