Why you should experience Al Baretto San Marco in Milan, Italy.
Al Baretto San Marco is a polished seafood restaurant where Brera's cultivated northern quarter meets Redi Shijaku's contemporary interpretation of classic Italian dining, close-set tables and a maritime kitchen centered on pristine fish.
Set along Via Marsala near Via Solferino and just steps from Piazza San Marco, the restaurant occupies a Brera pocket shaped by historic churches, former convent properties and the narrow streets extending north from the district's artistic core. Dark wood, mirrors, upholstered seating and closely arranged tables give the dining room the proportions of an established Milanese salon. A substantial bar introduces another layer to the room, with the visible kitchen bringing cooking into direct view from the surrounding tables. Warm lighting and restrained decorative detailing carry the intimate scale through the evening as the room fills around dinner service. The result is a Brera restaurant whose compact architecture and closely calibrated interiors support the convivial formality behind its interpretation of Italian dining.
What you should know about Al Baretto San Marco.
Al Baretto San Marco is best known for Redi Shijaku's development of a contemporary Italian restaurant model that grew from the hospitality group he founded in Milan in 2020. Shijaku established La Gioia Collection around a deliberately traditional conception of restaurant hospitality, with La Gioia San Marco preceding Al Baretto San Marco as the group expanded through Central Milan. Al Baretto opened on Via Marsala in 2023 as the collection's first address under that name, concentrating the project around classic Italian cooking with a pronounced seafood direction. Osteria Serafina and Osteria Afrodite subsequently broadened Shijaku's portfolio, and the latter opened in November 2024 with another interpretation of the group's Italian cooking philosophy. Al Baretto itself generated a second location when Al Baretto Sant'Ambrogio opened in late 2025, moving the concept into a larger restaurant with interiors created by La Gioia Collection's internal architecture and design studio. By the end of 2025, Shijaku's collection comprised five Milan restaurants, employed more than 200 people and projected annual revenue above €20 million, a substantial expansion from the independently financed venture begun five years earlier. Corporate chef Giovanni Russo subsequently assumed culinary responsibility across the collection, connecting Al Baretto San Marco with a broader kitchen structure devoted to ingredient sourcing and consistent execution across Shijaku's restaurants.
Raw seafood establishes the opening register through scampi tartare with avocado and lemon, amberjack carpaccio sharpened by aji amarillo and dill, and purple-prawn battuta enriched with foie gras. Tuna moves onto charcoal with escarole, Kalamata olives, sultanas, capers and tarragon, bringing smoke, salinity and sweetness into a fish-led preparation. Pasta deepens the marine direction through monograno linguine with lobster, red datterini and grated citron, then malloreddus pair red prawn with yellow datterini and fresh chili. Risotto combines saffron threads with finely cut purple prawn, placing the raw crustacean against the heat and creaminess of the rice. The Josper becomes central for larger fish, with the daily catch prepared over charcoal or taken toward Mediterranean combinations of potatoes, olives and artichokes. Black cod with yuzu miso, seasonal mushrooms and asparagus introduces a Japanese accent at the richer end of the repertoire, completing a sequence driven by raw preparation, charcoal, pasta and concentrated seafood sauces.
How to fold Al Baretto San Marco into your trip.
Al Baretto San Marco works as the dinner endpoint for an afternoon tracing northern Brera through an Augustinian complex tied to major moments in Milanese music, a Renaissance residence reconstructed after fire and a private garden reshaped as the city modernized around it.
Begin at Chiesa di San Marco, where Augustinian prior Lanfranco Settala established a three-nave church in 1254 that later became the order's Milanese general house and expanded through substantial Baroque alterations. The complex acquired an exceptional musical history: the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stayed in its canonica for three months, Giovanni Battista Sammartini served as organist and Giuseppe Verdi conducted the first performance of his Messa da Requiem there on May 22, 1874, marking the first anniversary of Alessandro Manzoni's death. Continue to Palazzo Landriani, a residence transformed after an early-sixteenth-century fire through work attributed to architect and theorist Cesare Cesariano, whose surviving façade uses Doric pilasters, terracotta window decoration and triangular pediments. Later seventeenth-century alterations changed part of the exterior, yet the Renaissance portico survives with Corinthian columns; paintings once associated with Bernardino Luini were removed from its walls, and the palace eventually became home to the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere. Conclude at Giardino Perego, created after the Perego di Cremnago family acquired land belonging to the suppressed monastery of Sant'Erasmo and commissioned Luigi Canonica to develop the garden in 1778. Canonica's formal geometry, elliptical fishpond and neo-Gothic greenhouse subsequently gave way to an English-style redesign executed by Luigi Villoresi, before twentieth-century road construction divided the property and its northern portion entered public use in 1941. The progression moves from an Augustinian church transformed into a stage for Mozart, Sammartini and Verdi through Cesariano's reconstruction of a Renaissance residence into Canonica and Villoresi's successive redesigns of an aristocratic garden, tracing centuries of religious, domestic and landscape patronage around northern Brera.
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