Why you should experience La Società Milano in Milan, Italy.
La Società Milano is an intimate fine-dining restaurant where Porta Venezia's cosmopolitan evening culture meets Giulia Litrenta and Andrea Romanelli's deeply personal union of contemporary cooking, cocktails, collected objects and old-world hospitality.
Set along Via Panfilo Castaldi near Via Lazzaretto and just steps from the Giardini Indro Montanelli, the restaurant occupies three interconnected rooms conceived by Litrenta with the familiarity of a private home and the visual richness of an old English club. London wallpapers distinguish the rooms, velvet seating accompanies design pieces and antiques, and an eighteenth-century white Carrara-marble fireplace anchors the entrance beside a backlit bar. Portraits of the founders' ancestors, antique books, mirrors, butterflies and collected objects deepen the domestic character, with a twelve-seat social table giving the smallest gatherings a communal focal point. The result is a Porta Venezia restaurant where Litrenta and Romanelli have made personal history, decorative collecting and sophisticated hospitality inseparable from the evening.
What you should know about La Società Milano.
La Società Milano is best known for bringing together Andrea Romanelli and Giulia Litrenta after two radically different careers converged through food, drinks and hospitality. Romanelli, born in Milan in 1984, inherited his fascination with cooking from his mother and entered a small Milanese bistrot at about 15 as a dishwasher. Watching the cooks through the kitchen hatch led him to reproduce their techniques at home, and the owner soon moved him into food preparation before entrusting him with cold dishes, gourmet sandwiches and cocktails at a larger venue during the 1990s. Mixology became a second discipline, and two years later Romanelli joined Milan's Ras Gallery-Bookstore, where he helped turn its cafe into a bistrot. At 21 he moved to Spain, becoming a bar manager in Tenerife before working through Ibiza and Formentera, followed by experience in Barcelona, Madrid, the Côte d'Azur and Munich. He returned to Italy at 25 for advanced cooking courses and time at Villa Crespi with Antonino Cannavacciuolo, whose kitchen sharpened his plating technique. Romanelli met Litrenta in 2011. She brought a background in nutrition and real estate, a career that had exposed her to restaurants and cocktail culture across Italy and abroad. In 2014 they combined their skills in Kitchen@more, a four-year Milan project that preceded La Società in 2019. Litrenta took charge of the rooms, hospitality and drinks, Romanelli the kitchen, and their restaurant entered the MICHELIN Guide selection in 2023.
Romanelli's current cooking turns those international years into specific technical collisions. Carbonara di agnello cooks Gragnano fusilloni in Pecorino Romano DOP water before adding carbonara cream, lamb soffritto, its cooking jus and pecorino fondue. Cacio e pepe di mare combines squid-ink tagliolini with lemon-dressed shrimp tartare, squid-ink mousse, red roe and cacio e pepe fondue. Vicenza-Bangkok places sablefish cooked in coconut milk and green curry against soft polenta, moving directly between northeastern Italy and Southeast Asia. Red tuna receives another treatment through a sesame crust, teriyaki gel, fried capers, Taggiasca olive powder and white-rice chips. A Lombard beef tartare arrives with milk-and-butter brioche, marrow jus, saffron mayonnaise and crisp onion. The vegetarian repertoire pushes the same method into fusilloni with pea cream, crisp peas, truffle zabaglione and hazelnut-cocoa crumb. Litrenta's drinks program creates the other half of the pairing structure through a collection exceeding 150 gin labels, allowing the bar to work alongside Romanelli's cooking as a parallel discipline.
How to fold La Società Milano into your trip.
La Società Milano works as the dinner destination after an afternoon tracing Porta Venezia through Napoleonic aristocratic architecture and two radically different experiments in Milanese Liberty design.
Begin at GAM Milano, housed inside the Villa Reale that Count Ludovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso commissioned from Leopoldo Pollack between 1790 and 1796. The Italian Republic acquired the unfinished residence after Belgiojoso's death, Napoleon later used it during Milan visits and Eugène de Beauharnais established his residence there in 1805, commissioning decorative work involving Andrea Appiani. Milan acquired the villa in 1920, and the Galleria d'Arte Moderna established its permanent home there the following year. Continue to Casa Galimberti, where brothers Angelo and Emilio Galimberti commissioned Giovanni Battista Bossi to create a residence on former horse-tram ground between 1902 and 1905. Bossi covered its 68-meter corner facade with 170 square meters of polychrome ceramic decoration executed by Ferdinando Brambilla and Pio Pinzauti, joining painted human figures and vegetation with ironwork from the Arcari firm. Conclude at Casa Guazzoni, Bossi's 1903-1906 commission for builder Giacomo Guazzoni on another portion of the former Società Anonima degli Omnibus site. Here ceramic color gives way to sculpted cement, with female faces, putti and floral reliefs rising through the facade, ironwork associated with Alessandro Mazzucotelli climbing across the upper balconies and Paolo Sala contributing painted decoration inside. Guazzoni himself executed the building work, completing a second major Bossi experiment only a few steps from Casa Galimberti. The progression moves from Pollack and Appiani's aristocratic world at Villa Reale through Bossi, Brambilla and Pinzauti's polychrome Casa Galimberti into Bossi, Guazzoni, Mazzucotelli and Sala's synthesis of sculpture, iron and painting at Casa Guazzoni, tracing three distinct episodes of architectural patronage across Porta Venezia.
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