Why you should experience Izu Milano in Milan, Italy.
Izu Milano is a refined Japanese restaurant where Porta Romana's cosmopolitan character meets Jin Yue Hu's transformation of his parents' modest takeaway shop into a creative Japanese institution shaped by childhood kitchen work, Italian restaurant training and decades of international culinary exploration.
Set along Corso Lodi near Via Adige and just steps from Porta Romana's southern commercial corridor, the restaurant occupies the same address from which the Hu family began building Izu more than three decades ago. A recent redesign introduced American natural-wood tables, white Carrara marble, reflective surfaces and 1,250 suspended points of light, giving the enlarged dining room a distinctly contemporary scale. Ten street-facing windows now replace the single storefront of the original family business, making the physical expansion itself legible from Corso Lodi. Warm timber and concentrated lighting temper the larger footprint and draw attention toward plates assembled with the visual precision of contemporary Japanese cooking. The result is a Porta Romana restaurant whose physical evolution mirrors the extraordinary distance traveled from the Hu family's original one-window shop.
What you should know about Izu Milano.
Izu Milano is best known for Jin Yue Hu's transformation of the small Corso Lodi takeaway business established by his Chinese parents in 1993 into one of Milan's longest-running creative Japanese restaurants. His parents came from a farming family and entered Milanese hospitality with a single storefront devoted to takeaway food, becoming early Chinese restaurateurs in Italy to embrace Japanese cooking. Jin grew up inside that business and sought kitchen work from childhood, cleaning pans simply to remain beside his father. His professional development later carried him beyond the family restaurant into the management of two Italian restaurants, where he learned breadmaking and absorbed techniques that widened his culinary reference points. He returned to succeed his father at Izu in 2010, bringing Japanese technique into contact with Italian, Chinese, South American and Korean influences accumulated through work, travel and study. A journey to Japan supplied the restaurant's name after the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka Prefecture, whose fish, landscape and hospitality left a strong impression on him. Jin eventually expanded his parents' single storefront into ten street-facing windows, and the restaurant underwent a comprehensive redesign after its thirtieth anniversary alongside a renewal of 70 percent of the food selection. Gambero Rosso awarded Izu two Mappamondi in its Lombardia 2025 guide. MICHELIN added the restaurant to its Italian selection in February 2025 and retained Izu in the 2026 guide, giving formal recognition to a family project that had begun as a tiny takeaway operation more than three decades earlier.
Trilogia di ceviche places three white fish into separate treatments, with charcoal-seared redfish, amberjack and sea bass joined by Peruvian-style acidity, coriander oil and Tropea onion chilled in ice before service. Scarpetta di tonno works through three cuts of bluefin, combining lean akami, semi-fatty chu-toro and fatty o-toro with karashi miso before nori chips provide the crisp surface used to scoop the tartare. Nigiri omakase follows seasonality, with combinations including bluefin tuna belly and Mazara del Vallo red prawn selected around the strongest seafood available to the kitchen. Scallop carpaccio introduces yuzu vinaigrette, umeboshi and purple basil, moving Japanese acidity through an Italian raw-seafood format. Go Piemonte Tataki turns to Fassona beef, applying an old Osaka marinating technique before searing the meat and placing it over seasonal vegetables. Niku gyoza carries Jin's Chinese heritage into another direction through saffron-colored wrappers filled with pork, and catalana di astice takes a Mediterranean shellfish preparation through crisp vegetables, tomato, avocado and Japanese shiso. These dishes make Izu's cross-cultural cooking concrete through ingredients and techniques that move repeatedly between Japan, China, Italy and South America.
How to fold Izu Milano into your trip.
Izu Milano works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing the conversion of specialized Milanese structures into new cultural spaces, moving from an eighteenth-century burial complex through a twentieth-century produce-market pavilion to an industrial distillery reconstructed for contemporary art.
Begin at Rotonda della Besana, created after the burial ground of the Ospedale Maggiore became inadequate and developed from 1695 around the church of San Michele ai Nuovi Sepolcri. Francesco Croce, Attilio Arrigoni and Francesco Raffagno contributed to the complex, whose portico surrounds the former cemetery with skull-shaped capitals still recalling its funerary purpose; after later use as a hospital, barracks and barn, Milan acquired it in 1939 and eventually converted the enclosure into a public garden and cultural venue. Continue to Palazzina Liberty Dario Fo e Franca Rame, designed by Alberto Migliorini between 1908 and 1911 as the refreshment and merchants' negotiation pavilion for Milan's Porta Vittoria produce market. The surrounding market disappeared after its 1965 relocation, but Migliorini's iron-framed windows, ceramic ornament and floral decoration survived; Dario Fo and Franca Rame's La Comune occupied the abandoned pavilion from 1974, converting a commercial relic into a theater laboratory before later musical uses extended its cultural life. Conclude at Fondazione Prada, where OMA transformed a 1910s distillery into the foundation's permanent Milan venue, opened in 2015 through seven existing buildings and the new Podium, Cinema and later Torre. The 60-meter Torre completed the complex with nine floors whose ceiling heights rise from 2.7 to 8 meters, extending Rem Koolhaas and OMA's architectural strategy of retaining industrial fabric beside deliberately distinct additions. The progression moves from Croce, Arrigoni and Raffagno's funerary enclosure recast for culture through Migliorini's market pavilion appropriated by Fo and Rame into OMA's conversion of industrial architecture for Fondazione Prada, tracing three centuries of Milanese structures acquiring radically new cultural lives.
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