Why you should experience Ba Restaurant in Milan, Italy.
Ba Restaurant is a polished Chinese dining room where De Angeli's composed residential character meets Marco Liu's contemporary interpretation of Chinese cuisine, sculptural design and an unusually serious relationship between dim sum, regional technique and wine.
Set along Via Raffaello Sanzio near Via Carlo Ravizza and just steps from Piazza Piemonte, the restaurant occupies a western Milan pocket shaped by early-twentieth-century villas, apartment houses and the cultural institutions clustered around Piazza Buonarroti. Naos Design rebuilt the interior in 2019 around dark raw-concrete walls, black timber tables and an open kitchen whose reflective metal surfaces break through the subdued room. Large red chandeliers reinterpret anemones and Chinese lanterns overhead, joined by Shishi lions, Tai-Chi-inspired sculpture and century-old Chinese roof tiles repurposed across the walls. A communal table made from charred cedar introduces the Japanese Shou Sugi Ban technique, adding another handcrafted surface to an interior stripped of conventional restaurant ornament. The result is a De Angeli dining room where Chinese symbolism, raw architectural surfaces and carefully controlled lighting establish a precise stage for Marco Liu's cooking project.
What you should know about Ba Restaurant.
Ba Restaurant is best known for Marco Liu's decision at twenty years old to turn his family's Italian restaurant into a serious contemporary exploration of the Chinese cooking his parents had left behind when building their lives in Italy. Liu was born in Italy to Chinese parents and grew up inside a restaurant family whose first operation in Rio Saliceto, near Reggio Emilia, was a pizzeria serving Italian food with a Calabrian pizzaiolo and a Sardinian chef. His siblings followed different branches of Asian gastronomy in Milan: Claudio Liu developed Iyo into the city's first MICHELIN-starred Japanese restaurant, and Giulia Liu later took command of Gong Oriental Attitude. Marco chose China. He launched Ba in 2011 around the conviction that Milan lacked Chinese restaurants giving comparable attention to cuisine, service, surroundings and wine, turning the family's previous Italian operation toward the culinary heritage of his parents. The Liu family's collective influence received national recognition when Gambero Rosso named them Restaurateurs of the Year in its 2021 Ristoranti d'Italia guide, encompassing Ba alongside Iyo Experience, AAlto, part of Iyo, Gong and Iyo Omakase. Ba underwent a major reinvention in 2019, with Liu reconsidering both the cooking and the physical environment after nearly a decade of operation. Malaysian dim sum chef Kean Wu now holds a central technical role in the kitchen, and head sommelier Marco Spini brings another specialized discipline to a restaurant where wine pairing has long been treated with the seriousness of the food. MICHELIN continues to include Ba in its Milan selection for Chinese cuisine, completing a development that began with a second-generation restaurateur reclaiming his family's culinary origins and matured into one of the Liu family's principal Milan projects.
Kean Wu's dim sum provide the clearest introduction to the kitchen through multiple doughs, fillings and cooking techniques: xiao long bao capture hot broth inside delicate wrappers, jiaozi emphasize folded wheat dough, guo tie add a browned base and cheung fun wrap fillings inside translucent steamed rice sheets. Handmade rice noodles extend that craft through flour, starch and water, with thickness adjusted before steaming according to a method retained within the Liu family. Trofie made from rice shift the pasta form toward prawns, red onion and lardo di Colonnata, connecting Chinese technique with a distinctly Italian cured ingredient. Scallops arrive with XO sauce, asparagus, foie gras sauce and cured-ham chips, building sweetness and marine depth against fermentation, richness and crisp salinity. Dongpo pork takes the opposite route through prolonged cooking, with pork belly simmered in soy, rock sugar, spring onion, orange peel and vegetable broth until the liquid becomes dense around the meat, then paired with freshly steamed Chinese buns. Marco Spini's wine work carries those concentrated flavors into a cellar developed across Italian and international bottles, giving dim sum, slow-cooked meats and seafood a pairing structure rarely granted such prominence in Milanese Chinese dining.
How to fold Ba Restaurant into your trip.
Ba Restaurant works as the dining endpoint for an afternoon through De Angeli and Piazza Buonarroti that connects Giuseppe Verdi's final philanthropic project, Giuseppe Sommaruga's Liberty experimentation and a neighborhood theater created during Milan's interwar expansion.
Begin at Casa Verdi, conceived by Giuseppe Verdi during the final years of his life as a home for musicians facing poverty in old age and designed by Camillo Boito after the composer began developing the project during the 1890s. Construction started in 1896 and finished in 1900; Verdi established the foundation in 1899, assigned income from his works to its support and requested burial beside Giuseppina Strepponi in its chapel, whose crypt later received mosaics developed from Ludovico Pogliaghi's designs. Continue to Villa Romeo Faccanoni, commissioned by engineer Luigi Faccanoni from Giuseppe Sommaruga and built between 1912 and 1914 with wrought iron by Alessandro Mazzucotelli and interior decoration by Eugenio Quarti. Nicola Romeo acquired the property in 1919, and its history changed again during 1938-1940 when Gio Ponti, Antonio Fornaroli and Eugenio Soncini adapted and expanded it for clinical use; two female sculptures by Ernesto Bazzaro, removed from Sommaruga's scandal-provoking Palazzo Castiglioni, survive on the garden façade. Conclude at Teatro Nazionale, commissioned by cinema operator Mauro Rota from architect Mario Borgato and inaugurated on December 20, 1924 with Sem Benelli's La cena delle beffe. Giordano Rota modernized the building during the 1980s as theatrical programming regained prominence after years centered on cinema, and the stage subsequently hosted Rudolf Nureyev on his return to Italian performance after a prolonged absence. The progression moves from Verdi and Boito's purpose-built refuge for musicians through Sommaruga's Liberty residence and Ponti's later conversion into Borgato and Rota's interwar theater, tracing the architectural and performing-arts history concentrated around Ba Restaurant's western Milan neighborhood.
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