Why you should experience Lubna Milano in Milan, Italy.
Lubna Milano is an atmospheric listening restaurant where Scalo Romana's post-industrial character, emerging creative quarter, analog music culture and a secluded courtyard setting converge inside a former early twentieth-century oxygen-cylinder depot transformed for long evenings of dining and sound.
Set along Via Vezza d'Oglio near Via Orobia and just steps from ICA Milano, the listening restaurant occupies a former industrial enclave south of the railway, where old production buildings increasingly sit beside contemporary art spaces and new architecture around the broader Scalo Romana district. A semicircular glass volume opens toward a porphyry courtyard planted with three holm oaks, drawing the restaurant outward from the surviving industrial structures and giving the arrival an unexpected sense of separation from the surrounding streets. Concrete, black iron, mirrored modules and subdued illumination continue inside, then vinyl DJ sets shift the room after dinner through funk, disco, house, jazz and deeper electronic selections chosen by rotating selectors. The result is a restaurant whose secluded industrial setting and analog musical program turn dinner into the opening movement of a longer Scalo Romana night.
What you should know about Lubna Milano.
Lubna Milano is best known for bringing Lorenzo Querci, Enrico Croatti and Giovanni Allario into a second major Milan project after their work at Moebius, extending a partnership already distinguished across fine dining, cocktails and music. Querci was born in Siena in 1992 and grew up among the tables of his family's restaurant before studying law at Università Bocconi and spending a period in Hong Kong. He returned to the family profession and founded Moebius in Milan in 2019, developing a combination of restaurants, cocktails, live jazz and vinyl culture that later earned a MICHELIN star for Moebius Sperimentale and international recognition for its bar. Lubna emerged from another collaboration involving Natascia Milia, Francesco Sicilia and Lorenzo's father Alberto Querci, with the four partners taking over a 3,000-square-meter former industrial property and opening the new project in December 2024. Chef Enrico Croatti arrived with an unusually international career behind him. His early path moved through Angelini Osteria in Los Angeles, an encounter with Paul Bocuse at Auberge du Pont de Collonges, Akelarre in San Sebastián, Les Terrasses de Lyon and Grand Hotel Miramonti Majestic in Cortina d'Ampezzo before MICHELIN stars followed at Dolomieu in 2013, Orobianco in Calpe in 2018 and Moebius Sperimentale in 2024. Giovanni Allario brought a parallel career from the cocktail world. Born in Caracas in 1991 and raised in Genoa, he began in industrial design, moved to Paris, participated in the opening of Danico and later directed Le Syndicat before returning to Italy in 2022 to lead the bar at Moebius. That Parisian experience connected Lubna directly with two bars that reached The World's 50 Best Bars, followed by Moebius entering the ranking at No. 38 in 2024. Luca and Marco Baldini of Florence-based Studio q-bic authored the architectural project, continuing their relationship with Querci after designing Moebius and organizing the larger Vezza d'Oglio complex around a new central piazza. Querci carried his fascination with comics into the name itself: Moebius honors French artist Jean Giraud, and Lubna takes its name from the young companion of the android Ranxerox created by Stefano Tamburini and Tanino Liberatore in the late 1970s. The combination of Querci, Croatti and Allario quickly produced another distinction when Identità Golose named Lubna its 2025 Opening of the Year in the guide dedicated to authorial pizzerias and cocktail bars.
Fire provides the continuous culinary mechanism, beginning with Croatti's division of the food into raw preparations, cooking over embers and gelato before Allario carries the same idea into the glass. Passatelli move through grilled broth with dried porcini, bringing smoke into a preparation usually associated with the gentler register of Romagna home cooking. Maltagliati push pasta directly onto the grill before Lamon beans supply softness beneath the toasted surface, and beetroot cooked beneath the embers develops deeper sweetness against taleggio and hazelnuts. Mixed grill then reduces the premise to direct contact between heat and pork, lamb and beef, giving the central cooking method its least disguised form. Sunday lasagna takes a longer route: pasta and ragù are made from scratch beginning Saturday morning, then wood embers crisp the exterior around a softer interior when the dish reaches the table the following day. Allario transfers that heat into drinks through roasting, scorching and smoke. Peanut and Rosemary combines vodka, peanuts, lemongrass and burned rosemary; Roasted Pumpkin joins gin, gentian, bergamot, Champagne and roasted pumpkin; Yogurt Toreador moves tequila, apricot acquavite, triple sec, lime and yogurt against charcoal oil. Banana Punch closes the same arc through bourbon, Amontillado sherry, buckwheat, toasted banana and clarified milk, allowing the grill to travel from pasta and meat into aroma, extraction and cocktail texture without losing the central premise of the meal.
How to fold Lubna Milano into your trip.
Lubna Milano works as the evening anchor for a southern Milan itinerary tracing three distinct experiments in contemporary culture through an independent arts institute, an industrial distillery reconstructed for international art and a twentieth-century church transformed by Dan Flavin's colored light.
Begin at ICA Milano, created in 2019 by art historian Alberto Salvadori as an Institute for Contemporary Arts modeled conceptually on the Anglo-Saxon ICA tradition that began in London in 1946. Salvadori arrived after directing Florence's Museo Marino Marini from 2009 to 2016 and curating the Modern and Decades sections of MIART between 2016 and 2022, bringing that institutional experience into a former 1930s industrial building on Via Orobia. Continue to Fondazione Prada, where Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli commissioned OMA under Rem Koolhaas to transform a distillery dating from the 1910s into a 19,000-square-meter arts complex. Seven existing structures were joined by Podium, Cinema and Torre, with the Milan headquarters opening in 2015 before the sixty-meter Torre completed the architectural project in 2018; OMA partners Chris van Duijn and Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and project architect Federico Pompignoli joined Koolhaas on the decade-long undertaking. Conclude at Santa Maria presso San Satiro Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa, the Giovanni Muzio church whose interior acquired an entirely different artistic life through American artist Dan Flavin. Reverend Giulio Greco invited Flavin to conceive the installation in 1996, shortly before the artist's death, and Fondazione Prada realized the project posthumously in 1997 during its Flavin retrospective. Green and blue fluorescent light occupies the nave, pink enters the transept and golden light concentrates toward the altar, using color to reorganize Muzio's architecture through a permanent site-specific work. The progression moves from Salvadori's contemporary institute through Koolhaas and OMA's reconstruction of an industrial distillery into Flavin's transformation of Muzio's church, joining three different models for placing contemporary art inside the inherited architecture of southern Milan.
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