Why you should experience Bao House in Milan, Italy.
Bao House is a focused Taiwanese street-food restaurant where Città Studi's residential streets meet Grace's determination to introduce Milan to the cooking of her native Taiwan, a compact counter format and the folded steamed buns that gave the restaurant its name.
Set along Via Plinio near Via Bartolomeo Eustachi and just steps from the early-twentieth-century architecture surrounding Corso Buenos Aires, the restaurant occupies an eastern Milan pocket where Liberty residences give way to the denser residential blocks approaching Piazza Aspromonte. A brick wall runs through the narrow interior, placing a warmer architectural surface behind a room containing only a small number of tables. Counter seating draws diners close to the kitchen and suits dishes assembled or finished moments before they arrive. The limited dimensions keep attention on cooking, with little physical separation between preparation, service and the people eating across the room. The result is a Città Studi restaurant whose small scale recreates the immediacy of Taiwanese street food through a Milanese storefront.
What you should know about Bao House.
Bao House is best known for Grace, its Taiwan-born founder, who opened the Via Plinio restaurant in 2017 after arriving in Milan to study communication and subsequently building a life in Italy through work in other fields. Her move into restaurants began with a specific observation: Milan had extremely limited representation of Taiwanese cooking, and the city lacked a specialist centered on the gua bao she associated with home. That gap gave Bao House its central purpose, with Grace using the folded steamed bun as an accessible introduction to a broader Taiwanese repertoire. The restaurant entered Milan during a period when specialist Asian street-food businesses were beginning to separate regional dishes from the generalized Chinese restaurant format, and its fifteen seats concentrated the concept around a short, recognizable selection. Bao House remained active at its original address as the gua bao became far more familiar across the city, preserving the Taiwanese emphasis that had prompted Grace's opening. Gambero Rosso subsequently included Bao House among Italy's recommended destinations for bao and later awarded the restaurant its Premio Foglia within the Locali Internazionali guide, with its latest evaluation in 2025. More than eight years after the opening, the Via Plinio operation still centers Grace's original specialty inside a broader collection of Taiwanese noodles, rice dishes, dumplings and street foods, turning an initial effort to represent her birthplace into one of Milan's longest-running specialist addresses for Taiwanese cooking.
The classic gua bao folds soft steamed bread around braised pork belly, pickled mustard greens, crushed peanuts and coriander, combining yielding meat with acidity, nuttiness and fresh herbs. An alternative version replaces the pork belly with roast duck finished with spring onion and sweet-sour sauce, keeping the steamed bun as the constant before changing the filling's richness and aromatic profile. Fried chicken takes a different route: marinated breast is enclosed with fermented-tofu sauce and salad, pairing a crisp exterior with the bun's soft crumb and the deeper savor of fermented soy. Popcorn chicken breaks the poultry into smaller breaded pieces for frying, moving the meal away from the bun format. Turnip cake uses daikon in a rice-flour batter that is steamed, seared and finished with soy glaze, creating a browned exterior around a softer center. Beef noodle soup supplies the slower, warmer counterpoint through noodles and meat submerged in broth, giving Grace's cooking a second Taiwanese reference point beside the handheld gua bao.
How to fold Bao House into your trip.
Bao House works as the dining endpoint for an afternoon examining the surrounding district through private twentieth-century collecting, Liberty-era residential expansion and an interwar experiment in metropolitan sports architecture.
Begin at Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano, the former home of engineer Antonio Boschi and ceramic artist Marieda Di Stefano inside a building designed by Piero Portaluppi between 1929 and 1931. The couple assembled more than 2,000 works and developed close relationships with contemporary artists; Boschi, a Pirelli engineer who patented the GIUBO transmission joint, donated their collection to Milan in stages beginning in 1974, and 300 works by figures including Boccioni, Carrà, Sironi, De Chirico, Fontana and Manzoni now occupy the apartment opened publicly in 2003. Continue to Casa Frisia, designed by Giuseppe Boni and constructed between 1908 and 1909 as the Corso Buenos Aires district underwent intense residential expansion. Boni organized the principal building and two secondary wings around a C-shaped courtyard, using Liberty architecture for a multi-story urban residence whose construction belongs to the transformation of Milan beyond its older central boundaries during the opening decade of the twentieth century. Conclude at Piscina Cozzi, designed by Luigi Lorenzo Secchi between 1933 and 1935 as one of Europe's earliest covered Olympic swimming complexes. Its reinforced-concrete structure accommodated two pools and spectator stands conceived for thousands of people; construction advanced from foundations to inauguration in only 194 days, giving Milan an immense indoor sports building clad in red brick and pale marble. The progression moves from Boschi and Di Stefano's private cultivation of twentieth-century art through Boni's Liberty residential expansion into Secchi's engineering of metropolitan sport at architectural scale, compressing three distinct phases of modern Milan into the streets surrounding Bao House.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Experience premium editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
