Why you should experience Gifuto Milano in Milan, Italy.
Gifuto Milano is a polished fusion restaurant where Loreto's cosmopolitan commercial quarter meets a family-rooted Asian operation, Japanese and Chinese cooking and an all-you-can-eat format developed around elaborate raw-fish preparations.
Set along Via Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina near Corso Buenos Aires and just steps from Piazza Argentina, the restaurant occupies a dense eastern Milan pocket shaped by apartment blocks, independent businesses and the long retail axis linking Loreto with Porta Venezia. Two principal dining rooms divide the interior into distinct seating areas, using contemporary finishes and warm illumination to frame a setting considerably more composed than the conventional large-format buffet room. Dark tables, upholstered seating and decorative lighting provide visual restraint around plates whose presentation supplies much of the color. An outdoor area extends the operation beyond those internal rooms, giving the restaurant another setting for its broad lunch and dinner service. The result is a Loreto restaurant where spatial polish supports an expansive Asian format built to move between raw seafood, cooked dishes and more elaborate fusion compositions.
What you should know about Gifuto Milano.
Gifuto Milano is best known for developing from a family-run fusion restaurant that arrived on Via Palestrina in 2019 into a broader Japanese-Chinese all-you-can-eat operation sustained through a later generational change. The original business emerged under Chen Yiting, with its Milan activity beginning in spring 2019 after a previous restaurant at the site gave way to the new Gifuto name and management. Early service combined Japanese and Chinese cooking with fusion preparations, and the restaurant's rear garden was still being completed during its first months, placing the opening inside an active physical redevelopment of the premises. The family character became visible from the beginning, with mother and daughter participating directly in service as the new operation established itself near Corso Buenos Aires. Gifuto survived the 2020 interruption by adding takeaway and delivery to its restaurant activity, preserving the same address through the disruption that followed its first year. A second operational chapter began in 2025 under Yu Shaoqin, whose name now heads the business connected with Gifuto and a staff numbering in the double digits. The contemporary operation presents itself as the product of years spent in Asian hospitality before bringing that accumulated experience to Milan, maintaining the Japanese-Chinese foundation established during its original 2019 opening.
Raw red prawn, avocado and salmon tartare meet ponzu and wasabi in the Tartare Special, establishing acidity, sweetness and heat before the mixed tartare adds tuna, sea bass, salmon and red prawn under another ponzu dressing. Nigiri shifts the fish-to-rice ratio through salmon, tuna, sea bass and cooked prawn, then flambé versions introduce direct heat across the surface without carrying it through the entire slice. The Osaka box develops that contrast through seared nigiri, tuna with truffle, salmon, flambé rolls, Dragon Roll, gunkan and mixed sashimi in a single composition. Butaniku gyoza move into cooked Chinese technique through pork and vegetable filling enclosed in dough, and ebi sticks add a crisp fried shell around prawn. Rice prepared Thai-style introduces chicken, vegetables and spiced curry, widening the kitchen beyond its Japanese core into Southeast Asian seasoning. Tartare, sashimi, seared sushi, filled dumplings, fried prawns and curry rice give the contemporary format several distinct temperature and textural registers within one service.
How to fold Gifuto Milano into your trip.
Gifuto Milano works as the dining endpoint for an afternoon following the neighborhoods south of Loreto through a private twentieth-century art collection, an experimental theatrical company and the subterranean infrastructure of interwar Milan.
Begin at Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano, the former apartment of engineer Antonio Boschi and ceramicist Marieda Di Stefano inside the residential building designed by Piero Portaluppi between 1929 and 1931. The couple assembled more than 2,000 works spanning Italian art from the early twentieth century through the 1960s and donated the collection to Milan in 1974; 300 pieces now occupy eleven rooms, including Boccioni, Carrà, de Chirico, Sironi, Morandi, Fontana and Manzoni, after the apartment opened publicly in 2003. Continue to Teatro Elfo Puccini, whose resident company began in 1972 with young performers including Gabriele Salvatores, Ferdinando Bruni, Elio De Capitani, Cristina Crippa and Corinna Agustoni before securing its first permanent theater on Via Ciro Menotti in 1978. The company joined Teatro Porta Romana in 1992 to create Teatridithalia, then moved in 2010 into the reconstructed former Teatro Puccini on Corso Buenos Aires, where Marcello Vecchi's project created three auditoriums named for Shakespeare, Fassbinder and Bausch. Conclude at Albergo Diurno Venezia, constructed beneath Piazza Oberdan between 1923 and 1925 and inaugurated as the Albergo Diurno Metropolitano in January 1926. Engineer Cleopatro Cobianchi's metropolitan service concept placed baths, barbers and personal-care facilities underground, with Piero Portaluppi responsible for major decorative and architectural components across an 1,200-square-meter complex whose original finishes survived decades of changing use. The progression moves from Boschi and Di Stefano's transformation of a private apartment into a civic art collection through the Elfo company's evolution from experimental theater to a three-stage institution into the Diurno's purpose-built underground architecture, tracing three distinct forms of twentieth-century Milanese cultural invention along the corridor south of Loreto.
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