Why you should experience Cantine A Mare in Milan, Italy.
Cantine A Mare is an ambitious seafood restaurant where Risorgimento's residential refinement meets Angelo Altieri's wine-first hospitality philosophy, Gaetano Tartaglione's Campanian cooking and a Mediterranean concept built to give seafood and wine equal consequence.
Set along Via Carlo Goldoni near Via Gustavo Modena and just steps from the residential streets surrounding Piazza Novelli, the restaurant occupies an eastern Milan pocket distinguished by early-twentieth-century apartment houses, Liberty decoration and later experiments in modern residential architecture. Pale upholstery, white tablecloths and understated wall finishes establish a composed dining room, with bottles displayed prominently enough to signal wine's central role before service begins. An open pass places the final stages of kitchen work in direct view of the dining room, bringing Tartaglione's plating into the visual experience of the meal. Outside, a sheltered pergola beneath aromatic plants extends the restaurant into a Mediterranean garden setting during warmer months. The result is a Risorgimento restaurant whose polished dining room, visible kitchen and planted exterior establish an appropriately focused stage for seafood and serious wine.
What you should know about Cantine A Mare.
Cantine A Mare is best known for extending Angelo Altieri's wine-first restaurant concept into seafood through a partnership with chef Gaetano Tartaglione, joining two careers that reached the project through very different routes. Altieri spent winters during his youth working in his family's olive mill in the province of Foggia and summers in tourism, then worked as an assistant cook in Santa Margherita Ligure before earning an economics degree. Wine moved to the center of his career through an export-management position in San Francisco for a Puglian winery, an F&B master at Bocconi and a commercial directorship for another Puglian producer that developed branded wine-bar concepts. Those experiences fed directly into Cantine Milano, opened in Isola in 2017 with Daniela Altieri and Gianni Viola around the reversal “first the wine, then the food,” initially supported by more than 300 labels. Altieri opened Cantine A Mare in October 2024 after finding a Dateo property already connected with seafood, carrying the original wine principle into a restaurant devoted to Mediterranean fish. Tartaglione brought a complementary trajectory from Marcianise: he entered a local pizzeria at 14, progressed through seasonal kitchen work and joined Hackert in Caserta, where he simultaneously assisted visiting MICHELIN-starred chefs and studied at its cooking academy. A sous-chef position with Ilario Vinciguerra gave him his first substantial kitchen-management responsibility before Cantine A Mare placed him in charge of his own cuisine. By 27, Tartaglione had also entered the venture as Altieri's business partner, turning the relationship between an entrepreneur trained through wine and a young chef formed through restaurant kitchens into the mechanism driving the second Cantine project.
Dripping “riso su tela” concentrates Tartaglione's seafood cooking into risotto layered with scampi, red prawns, mussels, clams and octopus, extending marine depth across shellfish and cephalopod in a dish designed for two. His plancha-cooked ombrina sets the fish against cauliflower treated in soft and crisp forms over a roasted reduction, shifting one vegetable through contrasting temperatures and textures. Tagliolini pair lemon butter with red-prawn tartare and a concentrated marine extract, using citrus acidity to sharpen the sweetness of the raw crustacean. Pasta mista turns mussel soup into a pasta course through shellfish, toasted-bread cream and tomato, and slowly cooked knife-cut octopus becomes ragù for tagliatelle. The raw selection moves through Fine de Claire, Gillardeau and Tarbouriech oysters alongside red prawns, scampi, sea urchin and caviar, exposing the restaurant's seafood premise with minimal intervention. Tartaglione's cooking gains its clearest character when familiar southern combinations are separated into precise components, as in polpo alla Luciana with datterino coulis, spring-onion cream and basil or his pairing of plancha technique with concentrated fish and vegetable reductions.
How to fold Cantine A Mare into your trip.
Cantine A Mare works as the dining endpoint for an architectural walk through the streets west of Dateo, where successive generations of Milanese designers moved from exuberant Liberty ornament toward a highly controlled late-twentieth-century residential modernism.
Begin at Palazzo Balzarini, an early-twentieth-century residence constructed by Andrea Fermini whose façade pushes Milanese Liberty through deeply modeled floral surrounds, balconies and a Moorish-shaped entrance. Alessandro Mazzucotelli supplied the dated 1902 entrance ironwork, and a curved decorative window separates the first and second courtyards, giving metal, cement and glass distinct roles within Fermini's unusually dense ornamental scheme. Continue to Case Via Carlo Pisacane 18-20, another Fermini project from the opening years of the twentieth century, where peacocks, shells, flowers and zoomorphic forms expand the architect's decorative repertoire across adjoining residential façades. First-floor windows terminate in shell-like crowns derived from peacock tails, and wrought-iron balcony rails, entrance gates and an interior lamp carry the same concentration of craftsmanship beyond the masonry ornament. Conclude at Condominio in Via Carlo Pisacane 25, designed by Luigi Caccia Dominioni between 1994 and 1996 for lawyer Giannina Goldstein, almost a century after the surrounding Liberty construction. Caccia Dominioni inserted a four-story residential volume between existing buildings and emphasized its tower-like verticality through a tightly symmetrical façade, a narrow central slit and a copper waterspout integrated with the arched entrance lintel, reducing architectural effect to proportion and exact detailing. The progression moves from Fermini and Mazzucotelli's floral synthesis at Palazzo Balzarini through the peacock-and-shell ornament of Fermini's adjoining houses into Caccia Dominioni's disciplined late-century intervention, compressing nearly a century of Milanese residential design into the streets surrounding Cantine A Mare.
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