Why you should experience Bomaki Porta Romana in Milan, Italy.
Bomaki Porta Romana is a colorful Japanese-Brazilian restaurant where Porta Romana's historic southern quarter meets tropical interiors, Japanese technique and the exuberant flavors that have defined Bomaki's cross-cultural cooking since its Milanese beginnings.
Set along Via Bernardino Corio near Via Orti and just steps from Corso di Porta Romana, the restaurant occupies a residential pocket behind the grand gateway where old Milanese streets increasingly give way to the neighborhood's restaurants and contemporary cultural spaces. Interior designer Farida El Tantawy's visual direction for Bomaki surrounds the dining room with saturated hues, tropical references and decorative elements drawn from South America. Dense planting and patterned surfaces carry that visual energy beyond individual accents, establishing an immersive backdrop for plates built around vivid fruit, seafood and sauces. The room's informal scale keeps the cooking close to the social character that has accompanied Bomaki from its earliest locations, with cocktails extending the restaurant naturally into the evening. The result is a Porta Romana restaurant where Japanese precision and Brazilian exuberance move through both the surroundings and the table.
What you should know about Bomaki Porta Romana.
Bomaki Porta Romana is best known for carrying the Japanese-Brazilian concept created in Milan in 2013 by Giuseppe Grasso, Francesco Zambon and Jeric Bautista into one of the group's established neighborhood restaurants. Grasso supplied the original entrepreneurial impetus, Zambon developed the hospitality operation and Bautista became the culinary force responsible for translating South American inspiration through Japanese forms. Their concept was compressed into the name itself: “bom,” Portuguese for good, joined “maki,” the Japanese roll, establishing the premise before the first restaurant had grown into a wider Milan network. Bautista's role deepened as executive chef, with his continuing development of new combinations turning Brazilian uramaki, temaki, ceviche, tacos and Nippo-Brazilian burritos into recurring signatures of the group. Farida El Tantawy developed the interior direction across the restaurants, giving the culinary concept an equally recognizable tropical visual character. By early 2022, Bomaki had reached eight restaurants between Milan and Turin; Augens Capital and BIC Capital then acquired a 75 percent majority position through a joint venture, with Grasso, Zambon and Bautista retaining the remaining 25 percent and continuing into the expansion phase. The following development cycle introduced Bomaki Rápido for shopping centers and pushed the group into additional locations, and by 2024 Bomaki had reached €16 million in sales across twelve restaurants. Porta Romana consequently belongs to a project whose growth originated in a specific collaboration among restaurateur, hospitality operator, chef and interior designer, then scaled without abandoning Bautista's original Japanese-Latin culinary premise.
Special Flambé Carpaccio layers salmon, tuna and sea bass with red prawn, scallop and gratinéed lobster tartare before ponzu, extra-virgin olive oil, spicy cream, avocado, tobiko and sesame bring acidity, richness and heat across the raw seafood. Exotic Sashimi takes another route through salmon, tuna and sea bass paired with mango gazpacho, passion fruit, physalis and starfruit, placing cool fish against tropical fruit and pronounced acidity. Sea-bass ceviche introduces coconut milk, avocado, cherry tomatoes, jalapeño, mango, coriander and red onion, with a corn tortilla adding crispness beside the marinated fish. Tonno Tonnato crosses into Italy through tuna carpaccio, tuna sauce, dry miso, truffle pearls, lime zest and yuzu miso, using familiar Piedmontese components as the foundation for Japanese seasoning. Salmon tataki receives yuzu-miso sauce, truffle pearls and sakura mix after searing, concentrating smoke, citrus and umami around the warmer exterior of the fish. Brazilian influence extends into the glass through caipirinhas built around tropical fruit, completing a meal in which citrus, mango, coconut, chili and raw or flame-treated seafood repeatedly connect Bautista's two culinary traditions.
How to fold Bomaki Porta Romana into your trip.
Bomaki Porta Romana works as the dining endpoint for an afternoon tracing the districts east and south of the historic gate through Baroque funerary architecture, Milan's interwar investment in public recreation and the survival of a commercial pavilion from the city's former wholesale market.
Begin at Rotonda della Besana, created for the Ospedale Maggiore after its existing burial space became insufficient, with construction beginning in 1695 and the first interments following in 1697. The central church of San Michele Arcangelo ai Nuovi Sepolcri rose from 1719, and the surrounding portico was completed in 1731 with financial support from silk merchant Giambattista Annone; Austrian sanitary reforms later ended the funerary function, leaving a complex subsequently used as a barracks, hay store, chronic-care facility and hospital laundry. Continue to Bagni Misteriosi, whose original Centro Balneare Caimi formed part of the 1930s Vasari-Battisti recreational complex alongside facilities for fencing, boxing, medical care and a library. Engineer Lorenzo Secchi designed the swimming pools added in 1937, placing the complex within the same interwar municipal program that produced the Lido, Ponzio and Cozzi pools before the Parenti complex revived the site decades later under the Bagni Misteriosi name. Conclude at Palazzina Liberty Dario Fo e Franca Rame, designed by Alberto Migliorini between 1908 and 1911 as a refreshment and trading pavilion within Milan's old fruit-and-vegetable market. The market departed for Via Lombroso in 1965, but Migliorini's iron-framed glazing, ceramic decoration and floral reliefs survived; Dario Fo and Franca Rame's La Comune occupied the building from 1974, turning a former mercantile meeting place into a center for theatrical performance and cultural experimentation. The progression moves from the Besana complex's eighteenth-century response to urban burial through Secchi's interwar architecture for public recreation into Migliorini's market pavilion and its reinvention by Fo and Rame, revealing successive ways Milan reassigned specialized civic spaces as the surrounding city changed.
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