Why you should experience Vik Pellico Otto Restaurant in Milan, Italy.
Vik Pellico Otto Restaurant is an art-filled Italian restaurant where Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Alex and Carrie Vik's hospitality project, an extensive contemporary collection and German Bentancur's modern interpretation of Italian cooking converge above the nineteenth-century arcade.
Set along Via Silvio Pellico near Piazza del Duomo and just steps from Piazza della Scala, the restaurant occupies the first floor of Galleria Vik Milano inside Giuseppe Mengoni's great covered passage, where marble floors, iron-and-glass vaults, historic storefronts and the constant pedestrian movement between Milan's cathedral and opera district form an unusually theatrical setting for lunch or dinner. Tables overlook the Galleria from arched openings as contemporary works extend directly into the restaurant from a hotel whose five floors function as a vast collective exhibition. Italian cooking anchors the meal, yet Bentancur moves freely through raw seafood, foie gras, saffron, Amalfi lemon, grilled meats and concentrated shellfish sauces before VIK wines connect the table with the owners' Chilean vineyard. The result is a restaurant whose position inside the Galleria joins contemporary art, modern Italian cooking and one of Milan's great nineteenth-century interiors within a single dining room.
What you should know about Vik Pellico Otto Restaurant.
Vik Pellico Otto Restaurant is best known for operating as the restaurant inside Alex and Carrie Vik's Galleria Vik Milano, an art-hotel project created after the couple acquired the former TownHouse Galleria and completely reworked the property for its 2019 reopening. The Viks approached architect Marcelo Daglio for the renovation, expanding the hotel from 58 to 89 rooms and developing each room as an individual art project rather than repeating a standardized decorative scheme. Galleria Vik subsequently assembled a collective exhibition across five floors, incorporating Vik Pellico Otto itself and a roster that includes Mario Arlati, Agostino Arrivabene, Matteo Basile, Alessandro Busci, Felipe Cardeña, Giovanni Frangi, Marco Lodola, Alessandro Papetti, Pino Pinelli and Giorgio Tentolini. Most works displayed throughout the property are available for acquisition, extending the hotel's role into that of a private museum and commercial art environment. The restaurant evolved from the property's earlier Vikissimo concept, which was conceived as an art-gallery restaurant overlooking the Galleria and a showcase for wines produced at VIK in Chile; the current Vik Pellico Otto preserves both the art connection and the wine relationship under a new name. German Bentancur now leads the kitchen, directing an Italian program with contemporary international accents and a dedicated tasting menu. The restaurant occupies a specific place within the Viks' broader hospitality project: it connects their 2019 Milan acquisition, Daglio's architectural reworking, a large multi-artist exhibition, the earlier Vikissimo concept, VIK's Chilean wine operation and Bentancur's current kitchen inside a dining room overlooking the Galleria.
Bentancur's menu begins with recognizable Italian structures and pushes them through more elaborate ingredient combinations, as vitello tonnato joins pink veal, a lighter tuna sauce, fried capers and reduced jus. Raw scampi meets seared foie gras, almond cream and cherry gel, and the VP8 Caprese replaces the familiar tomato-and-mozzarella structure with Mazara red prawn, creamy buffalo cheese, basil oil and bisque. Pasta intensifies the seafood progression through scampi ravioli with bisque and tagliolini with concentrated shellfish sauce and raw red prawn, then risotto shifts toward herbs and Amalfi lemon. Fassona tartare arrives with grilled marrow and saffron mayonnaise before the same beef moves into a cooked course with smoked sweet potato, melting onion and potato mille-feuille. Dessert retains the kitchen's preference for unexpected contrasts through goat cheesecake with cucumber sorbet and dried black olive crumble or chocolate with dulce de leche and smoked-milk gelato. VIK wine enters the cocktail program directly in the Forbidden Sour, which combines clarified bourbon, lemon and sugar with a finish of the owners' red wine, carrying the family's South American viticulture into the final stage of the meal.
How to fold Vik Pellico Otto Restaurant into your trip.
Vik Pellico Otto Restaurant works as the meal within a compact historic-center route connecting a sixteenth-century merchant palace, the competitive acquisition that created Milan's principal theatrical museum and Alessandro Manzoni's nineteenth-century home.
Begin at Palazzo Marino, commissioned by Genoese merchant Tommaso Marino and begun on May 4, 1558 under Perugian architect Galeazzo Alessi, who drew leading sculptors associated with the Duomo into its decoration. Alessi left the project in 1570, and the palace remained incomplete until Luca Beltrami finished it at the end of the nineteenth century; Milan had already established its municipal administration there in 1861. The principal courtyard develops a sculptural program around the labors of Hercules and episodes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, preserving the scale of Marino's private ambitions inside the later civic seat. Continue to Museo Teatrale alla Scala, whose origins reach to a 1911 Paris auction where Jules Sambon offered an important theatrical collection for 450,000 lire. Arrigo Boito, Lodovico Pogliaghi and Brera director Ettore Modigliani had already begun pursuing a Milan theater museum; the Italian state and fifty private citizens raised the purchase price, then J. P. Morgan emerged as a competing buyer before withdrawing. Puccini, Umberto Giordano, Enrico Caruso, Ricordi and Sonzogno joined the wider Milanese effort, and the museum opened in the former Casino Ricordi in 1913. Conclude at Casa Manzoni, purchased by Alessandro Manzoni from Don Alberico de Felber for 107,000 lire in 1813 and occupied by the writer from 1814 until his death in 1873. Andrea Boni reworked the house in Neo-Renaissance form in 1864, giving its Piazza Belgioioso façade elaborate terracotta decoration; Manzoni's study and bedroom survive inside a museum whose ten-section installation was developed by Michele De Lucchi around the writer's furniture, works, portraits and personal world. The progression moves from Marino and Alessi's sixteenth-century union of commerce, architecture and patronage through Boito, Pogliaghi and Modigliani's campaign to preserve theatrical culture into Manzoni's home, library and literary work, concentrating three distinct forms of Milanese cultural patronage within the streets surrounding Vik Pellico Otto Restaurant.
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