Why you should experience Azabu10 in Milan, Italy.
Azabu10 is an unconventional omakase restaurant where Bicocca's postindustrial northern edge meets Andrea Arcieri's intensely personal interpretation of Japanese raw-fish craft, visible maturation chambers and a dining format concentrated around two intimate counters.
Set along Via San Glicerio near Viale Fulvio Testi and just steps from the historic Bicocca district, the restaurant occupies a northern Milan pocket shaped by the transition from Pirelli and Breda industry toward university buildings, cultural spaces and contemporary residential development. A spare, faintly industrial interior concentrates attention on two dark-wood counters, with the chefs working directly across from a tightly limited group of diners. Fish-maturation chambers stand visibly behind the counter, turning Arcieri's treatment of whole fish into a physical component of the room before a knife reaches the cutting board. The current two-counter arrangement divides dinner into distinct acts, moving diners between workstations as preparation shifts through bites, sashimi, nigiri and cooked dishes. The result is a Bicocca restaurant where proximity to the chefs, visible maturation and counter choreography make Arcieri's treatment of fish inseparable from the physical structure of dinner.
What you should know about Azabu10.
Azabu10 is best known for Andrea Pietro Arcieri's development of an Italian-led omakase after a childhood inside his father Gianni Arcieri's seafood restaurant, years of international training and a temporary Puglian project that preceded his return to Milan. Born in Milan in 1997 and raised alongside sisters Daniela and Cristina within the family restaurant, Arcieri left at around 20 for a formative period across England, Japan and Spain focused on raw-fish technique. Five years working in London culminated in a head sushi chef position and exposed him to fish maturation, an approach he later pushed into the center of his own cooking. Arcieri returned to his family's Puglian roots in 2022 and launched Azabu10 as a six-month pop-up in Monopoli, using the temporary restaurant to develop the project before establishing its permanent Milan incarnation in 2023. The location brought his independent work back into unusually personal territory: the building where he opened sits beside San Glicerio, the Puglian restaurant operated by his family and part of the environment in which he grew up. Arcieri rejected strict replication of Japanese sushi orthodoxy and developed an omakase weighted heavily toward fish, maturation and techniques absorbed outside Japan, giving Mediterranean catch a central role beside Japanese products and methods. That approach earned Azabu10 the Novità dell'Anno special prize in Gambero Rosso's Sushi 2025 guide, placing the young chef's first permanent Milan restaurant among the guide's nationally recognized sushi destinations. His development continued beyond the restaurant through appearances including Festa a Vico 2026, where Arcieri presented a tuna nigiri with tuna heart and aged soy alongside a toro-and-takuan temaki.
Bluefin tuna demonstrates Arcieri's maturation work in its most concentrated form, with different sections of the fish rested before cutting and paired with rice served warm at 40 degrees. Nigiri deliberately shifts the conventional rice-to-fish balance toward a larger neta, making the texture produced through maturation more prominent in each bite. Earlier compositions have paired tuna belly aged for fourteen days with cherry soy, friggitelli, coriander oil and burnt-tomato oil with black garlic, extending the fish through sweetness, vegetal bitterness and fermentation. Sea bream has appeared with black summer truffle, turbot bottarga and miso; cuttlefish has been joined by sesame, soy-treated cherry and caviar. An open temaki has combined eel marinated in koji with cacao bean and dark chocolate, moving fermentation and roasted bitterness into a form associated with seasoned rice and nori. Cooked preparations expand the technique through Binchotan charcoal, tempura and steaming, including an udon preparation with mantis-shrimp broth, grilled-fennel purée, dried miso and red-prawn oil. Fermented elderflower syrup, seasonal fruit and fermented cherry sauce have finished shaved-ice kakigori, carrying the same manipulation of maturation, fermentation and acidity into dessert.
How to fold Azabu10 into your trip.
Azabu10 works as the dining endpoint for an afternoon tracing Bicocca through a Renaissance country residence, Pirelli's purpose-built worker housing and the enormous electrical-machinery halls later converted for contemporary art.
Begin at Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, the fifteenth-century country residence whose construction by the Arcimboldi family gave the surrounding district its name centuries before heavy industry arrived. The villa passed through several aristocratic families after the Arcimboldi line ended, underwent major restoration under Ambrogio Annoni in 1910 and entered Pirelli ownership in 1918, connecting one of northern Milan's surviving Renaissance residences directly with the industrial company then remaking the surrounding territory. Continue to Borgo Pirelli, developed from 1920 through agreements between Pirelli and the Istituto Autonomo Case Popolari to house employees of the neighboring Bicocca works. Completed in 1923, the village used five varieties of two-story houses arranged according to English garden-city principles, giving Pirelli workers domestic buildings, gardens and a small Liberty commercial block within walking distance of the factory and Greco station. Conclude at Pirelli HangarBicocca, where Breda Elettromeccanica e Locomotive added the barrel-vaulted Cubo in 1955 and constructed the immense Navate between 1963 and 1965 for assembling and testing high-powered transformers. The 9,500-square-meter Navate retain their 30-meter height; after industrial decline and acquisition by Prelios, the former Ansaldo 17 complex became an exhibition space in 2004, the same year Anselm Kiefer's towering The Seven Heavenly Palaces entered one of its aisles. The progression moves from the Arcimboldi family's rural Renaissance residence through Pirelli's garden-city housing for industrial workers into Breda's colossal electrical-production halls and their conversion for contemporary art, compressing five centuries of Bicocca's physical reinvention into the streets surrounding Azabu10.
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