Why you should experience Basara Sushi Restaurant in Milan, Italy.
Basara Sushi Restaurant is a polished Japanese dining room where Sant'Eufemia's historic center meets Hirohiko Shimizu's Japanese technique, Danilo Migliarese's entrepreneurial reinvention and Andrea Langhi's restrained approach to contemporary restaurant design.
Set along Corso Italia near Via Sant'Eufemia and just steps from Sant'Eufemia, the restaurant occupies a Central Milan pocket where paleochristian religious foundations, Renaissance convent architecture and seventeenth-century palaces converge along the approach to Porta Romana. Andrea Langhi designed the compact 2014 restaurant with rosewood, bronzed mirrors, smoked glass and steel, deliberately removing decorative references to conventional Japanese interiors. A glass partition exposes the fish laboratory behind the sushi counter, placing preparation within view without sacrificing the dining room's composed appearance. A large wall mirror visually expands the limited table area, balancing the smaller footprint with the operational emphasis on takeaway and delivery built into this second Basara location. The result is a Sant'Eufemia restaurant whose controlled design concentrates Japanese culinary work into an intimate room conceived around visibility, precision and metropolitan service.
What you should know about Basara Sushi Restaurant.
Basara Sushi Restaurant is best known for the partnership between Hirohiko Shimizu and Danilo Migliarese, whose radically different professional paths produced the original Basara sushi-pasticceria in Via Tortona in 2011 and its Corso Italia successor in September 2014. Migliarese had worked outside restaurants, selling Cotonella and Pierre Cardin women's underwear, when he met Shimizu after becoming a regular customer at Mizu, where the Japanese chef was working; Shimizu had also accumulated experience at Armani/Nobu before establishing his own venture. Their partnership formed rapidly after a December 2010 conversation about Shimizu's desire to leave salaried restaurant work, and three months later the first Basara was operating with only 28 seats. That physical constraint produced one of the brand's most consequential ideas: Migliarese concluded that dinner service alone would not sustain the small Tortona property, leading the partners to combine Japanese cooking with pastry and create the “sushi pasticceria” formula. Corso Italia followed three years later as the second restaurant, developed around delivery and takeaway alongside Shimizu's cooking, and Venice extended the concept outside Milan in 2015 before Porto Cervo followed in 2017. A third Milan restaurant on Via Giorgio Washington arrived in 2018 with another major development: the partners created a Japanese Food Academy beneath the restaurant to train professional cooks and introduce enthusiasts to sushi technique. The Basara name reaches further into Japanese cultural history, referring to medieval figures associated with rejecting established conventions in pursuit of a personal style, a reference that connects directly with Shimizu and Migliarese's original decision to combine Japanese restaurant craft with an unconventional pastry format.
Gamberi tempura establish one of the kitchen's recurring contrasts through hot crisp batter and soft shellfish, then reappear inside the Dragon Roll beneath avocado and kabayaki sauce. Astice gratinato pushes that construction further by pairing shrimp tempura with avocado, mayonnaise, gratinated lobster and the same dark sauce, stacking fried, creamy and roasted elements around the rice. Ricciola with jalapeño introduces cleaner raw fish and sharper heat, and salmon flambé changes the temperature of an uramaki through a lightly torched carpaccio covering avocado and tobiko. Chirashi Basara Style loosens the composition into cubes of mixed fish over seasoned rice with the chef's sauce, shifting attention from rolled structure toward individual cuts and their dressing. Hot preparations extend into yakisoba with soy-marinated chicken, tempura with udon in broth and grilled salmon served beside fried rice with prawns and vegetables. Raw fish, flame, frying, gratination and broth give Shimizu's repertoire several distinct technical registers without abandoning the rice-and-seafood foundation that established Basara.
How to fold Basara Sushi Restaurant into your trip.
Basara Sushi Restaurant works as the dining endpoint for an afternoon around Sant'Eufemia and the northern entrance to Porta Romana, tracing the area through an ancient basilica rebuilt across centuries, a convent church transformed by Cremonese painters and a silk merchant's seventeenth-century palace.
Begin at Sant'Eufemia, whose origins reach the fifth century and Bishop Senatore, who participated in the Council of Chalcedon with Bishop Abbondio and returned to Milan with a relic of Saint Euphemia. Fifteenth-century additions altered the earlier church before Enrico Terzaghi substantially reconstructed it in 1870; its later musical history added another layer when the basilica's acoustics supported 1950s opera sessions associated with Maria Callas, including I puritani, Cavalleria rusticana and La sonnambula. Continue to San Paolo Converso, begun in 1549 for the Angeliche di San Paolo, the female religious order created by Ludovica Torelli under the spiritual influence of Barnabite founder Antonio Maria Zaccaria. Giulio, Antonio and Vincenzo Campi turned the interior into an immense painted architectural composition across the vault and chapels; centuries later the deconsecrated church entered another phase when CLS Architetti installed a freestanding four-level steel structure without touching the frescoed walls, followed by the Converso contemporary-art project. Conclude at Palazzo Annoni, commissioned in 1631 by wealthy silk merchant Paolo Annoni from Francesco Maria Richini during the plague that devastated Milan. Carlo Annoni later developed the residence into an eighteenth-century cultural center with a substantial library and paintings by Rubens and Van Dyck; wartime destruction severely damaged the palace, and restoration between 1955 and 1961 left the grand staircase as a principal survivor of its historic interiors. The progression moves from Senatore's early Christian foundation through the Angeliche's union of religious patronage and Campi painting into the Annoni family's conversion of mercantile wealth into architecture and collecting, compressing more than a millennium of Milanese cultural development around Corso Italia.
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