Why you should experience Hostaria Mediterraneum in Milan, Italy.
Hostaria Mediterraneum is a convivial seafood restaurant where Porta Monforte's residential elegance meets Mediterranean catch, cherrywood grilling and Olimpio Giovannelli's translation of two decades in luxury hospitality into an intimate hostaria di mare.
Set along Via Carlo Goldoni near Via Gustavo Modena and just steps from Piazza Tricolore, the restaurant occupies a quiet eastern-central quarter where early twentieth-century residences extend between Corso Monforte and Porta Venezia. White walls, terracotta floors, pale-blue banquettes, oak tables, stone and aromatic plants give the compact interior the character of a contemporary coastal house. Daily Mediterranean catch establishes the primary encounter through raw preparations and direct cooking that keeps the fish itself central. Cherrywood embers deepen the meal with smoke and concentrated heat across shellfish, belly cuts and larger fish portions, bringing a distinctly elemental counterpoint to the crudi. The result is a Milanese seafood restaurant where coastal simplicity, intimate hospitality and live-fire cooking translate Giovannelli's luxury background into a deeply personal expression of the Mediterranean.
What you should know about Hostaria Mediterraneum.
Hostaria Mediterraneum is best known for Olimpio Giovannelli's decision to turn more than twenty years in luxury food and beverage into his first entrepreneurial restaurant project after a career spanning Hong Kong, Miami, New York and London. Giovannelli built the concept around a deliberate inversion of conventional luxury dining, pursuing exceptional hospitality through simplicity, informality and close interaction with diners. He chose Via Carlo Goldoni 3 despite the address having struggled to sustain previous restaurant concepts, then organized a young culinary team drawn from high-profile Italian kitchens under his direct leadership. Mediterranean fish became the project's governing ingredient, including less familiar portions such as collar, belly, cheeks and tail that extend the kitchen's use of individual catches beyond prime fillets. Cherrywood grilling supplied a second foundational technique, connecting Giovannelli's emphasis on direct preparation with smoke and high heat. Gnocchetti Mediterraneum became the signature dish through a reinterpretation of pasta allo scoglio that separates the seafood by preparation: components suitable for raw consumption remain raw, establishing a deliberate contrast against the cooked potato gnocchi and surrounding seafood. The restaurant expanded its original dinner focus with a Mediterranean brunch built around smaller versions of dishes, cocktails and DJ sets. A 2025 Tripadvisor Travellers' Choice distinction subsequently placed Hostaria Mediterraneum among the platform's recognized restaurants after its first full year of operation. Giovannelli's international hospitality career, unconventional address, whole-catch approach, cherrywood fire and signature gnocchetti established a restaurant whose refinement comes through the treatment of seafood and service.
Gnocchetti Mediterraneum provides the clearest route into the cooking through potato gnocchi, cooked seafood and raw crustaceans, using temperature and texture to reinterpret the familiar structure of pasta allo scoglio. The crudo program then strips preparation further back through oysters, langoustines, red prawns, tartare, sashimi, carpaccio, pink shrimp and baby cuttlefish, allowing sweetness, salinity and firmness to change across the plateau. Cherrywood embers redirect many of those same shellfish toward heat, introducing smoke and caramelization to razor clams, langoustines, red prawns and oysters. Larger preparations extend the fire through grilled fish belly with lemon agretti, keeping richer cuts against sharp vegetal acidity. Cod salad moves toward southern Italian intensity through potatoes, friggitelli, 'nduja sauce, basil, mint and an eggplant cream, and the Mediterraneum panzanella joins mantis shrimp and octopus with fennel, orange, Tropea onion, Taggiasca olives and basil. Raw fish, glowing embers, citrus, herbs and less familiar cuts carry the meal through successive expressions of Mediterranean seafood without obscuring the character of the catch.
How to fold Hostaria Mediterraneum into your trip.
Hostaria Mediterraneum works as the dinner endpoint for an afternoon tracing the extraordinary concentration of Liberty experimentation and interwar residential design that reshaped Milan's eastern bourgeois quarter during the first decades of the twentieth century.
Begin at Casa Campanini, designed by Alfredo Campanini for his own residence between 1904 and 1906 after Giuseppe Sommaruga's Palazzo Castiglioni had opened a more rebellious direction for Milanese Liberty architecture. Campanini designed the decorative program as well as the building, bringing Michele Vedani's two cement female figures to the entrance and commissioning Alessandro Mazzucotelli's workshop for wrought iron filled with vegetal forms; polychrome glass and sculptural decoration carried the same floral approach through the residence. Continue to Palazzo Berri Meregalli, where Giulio Ulisse Arata worked between 1911 and 1913 on one of three residences commissioned by the Berri-Meregalli family and pushed the district beyond conventional Liberty through Romanesque stonework, exposed brick, Gothic and Renaissance references. Alessandro Mazzucotelli contributed wrought iron, Angiolo D'Andrea and Adamo Rimoldi developed mosaics and painted decoration, and Adolfo Wildt's 1919 La Vittoria brought one of the sculptor's major works into the entrance hall. Conclude at Villa Necchi Campiglio, where Piero Portaluppi designed a private residence between 1932 and 1935 for sisters Nedda and Gigina Necchi and Gigina's husband Angelo Campiglio, members of Lombardy's industrial bourgeoisie. Portaluppi controlled the project at exceptional depth across the house and its surrounding grounds, and the residence later entered another creative chapter through Tomaso Buzzi's postwar interior interventions before the Necchi sisters bequeathed the property to FAI. Its opening as a house museum carried a private interwar commission into Milan's public cultural life and eventually into the Case Museo di Milano circuit created in 2008. The progression moves from Campanini and Mazzucotelli's floral Liberty through Arata, Wildt and the Berri-Meregalli family's eclectic experiment into Portaluppi's modern residence for the Necchi Campiglio family, revealing three successive architectural chapters within the refined eastern Milan surrounding Hostaria Mediterraneum.
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