Why you should experience Lon Fon in Milan, Italy.
Lon Fon is a storied Cantonese restaurant where Lazzaretto's dense central streets, the Tsui family's three-generation Milanese history, handmade cooking and nearly half a century of continuity converge inside one of the surviving addresses from the city's earliest Chinese restaurant culture.
Set along Via Lazzaretto near Viale Tunisia and just steps from Giardini Indro Montanelli, the Cantonese restaurant occupies Lazzaretto within a compact network of residential streets between Porta Venezia and Repubblica, maintaining an intimate scale despite the commercial movement surrounding Corso Buenos Aires. Two dining rooms preserve the close proportions of the restaurant Rita Kam and Fu On Tsui established in 1978, giving family members a visible presence across the tables as lunch and dinner develop. Cooking remains equally close to the dining room, with handmade pasta and dumpling preparation reinforcing a domestic rhythm that has survived decades of changing Milanese restaurant fashion. The result is a deeply rooted Milan address whose physical modesty places unusual emphasis on the family, cooking and continuity that have sustained it since the late 1970s.
What you should know about Lon Fon.
Lon Fon is best known for Rita Kam and Fu On Tsui carrying one of Milan's earliest Chinese restaurant lineages into a family institution that has remained on Via Lazzaretto since April 9, 1978. Rita's father, Sing Cheng King, known in Milan as Franco, entered the city's restaurant history in the early 1960s as a chef at La Pagoda, among the pioneering Chinese restaurants in Milan. His wife Yu Ying Cheng, known as Flora, and daughter Rita subsequently joined him in Italy, and the family became involved with Mandarin, another formative address in the city's first generation of Chinese dining. Rita learned cooking beside her father before meeting Hong Kong-born Fu On, known as Davide, in Milan. The couple spent two years in Naples, cooking for American military personnel attached to the NATO presence there, and their eldest daughter Pui Ling was born in Naples in 1976. They returned to Milan and opened Lon Fon two years later, at a point when only a small group of Chinese restaurants operated across the city. The name joins the dragon and phoenix, figures traditionally paired in Chinese culture, and the restaurant developed around Cantonese family cooking instead of abandoning those preparations as Milan's appetite for Asian food changed. Rita remained a working cook across the decades, passing the operation into a second generation that includes Pui Ling, Mei Fung and Mei Bou, with the daughters increasingly directing the dining room as their parents grew older. A third generation subsequently entered the family story, including grandson Andrew learning to shape dumplings beside Rita as a child. The family marked Lon Fon's fortieth anniversary in 2018 with a celebration attended by Saturnino, Victoria Cabello and Syria, extending a long association with figures from Milanese fashion, entertainment and design. Sing Cheng King and Yu Ying Cheng had previously been photographed by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari for Toiletpaper, placing the grandparents who began the family's Milanese chapter inside one of the city's internationally circulated contemporary-art projects. Lon Fon's history also became the subject of the 2016 book Lon_Fon Trattoria Milanese: 50 anni di cucina cinese a Milano, built around the family, Rita's kitchen and recipes preserved across generations. Rita Kam and Pui Ling received another distinction in 2024 when Premio Letterario Milano International named them Women of the Year for Gastronomic Culture, carrying a restaurant founded during Milan's first era of Chinese dining into formal recognition almost five decades later.
Handmade dumplings provide the clearest culinary thread through those generations, beginning with dough worked daily before Rita's meat filling brings together pork cuts, ginger, soy and onion inside thin wrappers shaped by hand. Steaming leaves the wrapper soft and emphasizes the filling, and griddle cooking introduces a browned base and sharper textural contrast. Crab xiao long bao shifts the dumpling sequence toward shellfish before the house Lon Fon soup moves into broth and a gentler register. Crispy Lon Fon chicken then changes the meal decisively through frying, creating a brittle exterior around the meat before spicy pork with vegetables introduces a hotter, more savory direction. Stewed duck with bamboo and mushrooms develops deeper softness and earthy flavors, followed by Cantonese rice as a restrained counterpoint to the richer meat preparations. Chinese seasonal vegetables return freshness and crunch to the table after the fried and braised courses. Lon Fon's cooking draws its force from this progression between handmade dough, steaming, frying, braising, crisp vegetables and rice, keeping the techniques Rita inherited and practiced at the center of a meal whose appeal rests on repetition refined across generations.
How to fold Lon Fon into your trip.
Lon Fon works as the dining anchor for a Lazzaretto itinerary tracing an epidemic enclosure transformed into sacred architecture, the Liberty rebuilding that followed its demolition and Piero Portaluppi's subterranean contribution to twentieth-century Milan.
Begin at Chiesa di San Carlo al Lazzaretto, the surviving religious nucleus of the immense quarantine enclosure that once occupied the surrounding district. Carlo Borromeo commissioned Pellegrino Tibaldi after the plague of 1576 to replace the earlier central altar, and construction of Tibaldi's octagonal church began in 1585; Giuseppe Piermarini removed its altar after the Napoleonic arrival in 1797, when the building became an Altar of the Fatherland, before its nineteenth-century restoration and reopening for worship in 1884. Continue to Casa Galimberti, created by Giovanni Battista Bossi between 1903 and 1905 for brothers Angelo and Emilio Galimberti as the former Lazzaretto district entered a radically different architectural age. Bossi covered more than 170 square meters of its exterior with figurative ceramic tiles produced by Pio Pinzauti and Ferdinando Brambilla, joining them with elaborate ironwork and floral cement decoration in one of Milanese Liberty's most concentrated compositions. Conclude at Albergo Diurno Venezia, developed beneath Piazza Oberdan between 1923 and 1925 and opened in January 1926 as the Albergo Diurno Metropolitano. Piero Portaluppi shaped its sophisticated decorative character through geometric surfaces, typography and furnishings for a subterranean complex conceived around the rituals of metropolitan grooming and personal care, creating an Art Deco interior beneath one of Milan's busiest gateways. The progression moves from Tibaldi's architecture for plague-era worship through Bossi's exuberant reconstruction of the former quarantine district into Portaluppi's subterranean vision of twentieth-century metropolitan culture, compressing centuries of Milanese transformation around Lon Fon's Via Lazzaretto address.
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