Why you should experience Casazul in Milan, Italy.
Casazul is a distinctive Mexican restaurant where Porta Romana's neighborhood dining culture meets Nicole and Alberto's Yucatán roots, family cooking and a contemporary interior conceived around the colors and craft traditions of Mexico.
Set along Via Lazzaro Papi near Corso Lodi and just steps from Porta Romana, the restaurant occupies a southern Milan pocket where nineteenth-century residential streets converge around one of the historic gateways into the city. Designer Sarah Balivo developed the interior for Nicole and Alberto around deep blue, natural textures and decorative references to Mexico, turning the dining room into a physical extension of the couple's culinary project. Wood, wicker and terracotta establish a warmer architectural register beneath saturated walls, with plants and crafted objects breaking the room into intimate visual layers. Blue provides the dominant chromatic thread, referencing the celebrated Mexican house from which Casazul takes its name and linking furniture, surfaces and decorative elements across the restaurant. The result is a Porta Romana dining room whose color, craft and intimate scale establish the Yucatán connection before the first dish reaches the table.
What you should know about Casazul.
Casazul is best known for Nicole and Alberto's decision to translate Nicole's Yucatecan family cooking into a contemporary Milan restaurant centered on the peninsula's regional cuisine. The young couple created the project from shared memories of the Yucatán, using Nicole's cooking as its culinary foundation and commissioning Sarah Balivo to develop an interior that carried the same Mexican references into the room. Family recipes became especially important to that foundation: the tamalito comes from the family repertoire, and the house flan follows Nicole's grandmother's recipe, connecting the restaurant's modern presentation to cooking transmitted across generations. Casazul widened that regional focus through traditional Yucatecan preparations and reinterpretations built around ingredients closely associated with southeastern Mexico, preserving the couple's origins as the organizing principle of the restaurant. Nicole brought that work to national television in 2025 when Casazul entered the Milan taco episode of Foodish, where Joe Bastianich and MasterChef Italia 12 winner Edoardo Franco visited the restaurant during their search across four Milan taco specialists. Bastianich tasted Nicole's traditional Mexican taco, placing her cooking directly inside the episode's examination of the city's contemporary Mexican restaurant scene. That appearance connected the childhood memories behind the project, Nicole's family repertoire and Casazul's Yucatán specialization to a wider Italian audience three years after the restaurant's 2022 launch.
Cochinita pibil provides the clearest route into the Yucatán through pork seasoned with achiote, cooked slowly inside banana leaves and served with pickled red onion, refried beans and tortillas. Salbutes shift the corn base into a fried tortilla carrying shredded achiote chicken, lettuce, tomato, red onion, avocado and salsa roja, creating alternating crisp, rich and acidic layers. Tamalito takes handmade corn dough in another direction, enclosing chicken or meat before steaming it inside a banana leaf and finishing it with salsa roja. Bolas de plátano pair fried plantain with a meat filling and mole negro, moving sweetness against the darker chile-and-spice depth of the sauce. The Jamaikito carries those contrasts into the bar through mezcal, lime, hibiscus and agave, and the Spicy Margarita combines tequila blanco with chile de árbol infusion, triple sec and lime. Churros with dulce de leche and chocolate finish through fried dough and dense sweetness, and the grandmother's caramel flan closes the meal through the family recipe that connects Casazul's contemporary cooking directly to Nicole's Yucatecan inheritance.
How to fold Casazul into your trip.
Casazul works as the dinner endpoint for an afternoon following the eastern side of Porta Romana through a former hospital cemetery, an early-twentieth-century wholesale-market survivor and the theater company that made this district a center of Milanese performance.
Begin at Rotonda della Besana, created for the Ospedale Maggiore after construction of its new burial ground began in 1695, with the church of San Michele ai Nuovi Sepolcri and the surrounding portico subsequently developing the complex into its distinctive enclosed form. Francesco Croce and Francesco Raffagno contributed to the architectural work, and the cemetery received the hospital's dead until Austrian reforms ended urban burials during the eighteenth century; the complex later passed through institutional uses before becoming a public cultural site. Continue to Palazzina Liberty, designed by Alberto Migliorini in 1908 as the café-restaurant and commercial meeting point for the Verziere wholesale fruit-and-vegetable market that occupied the surrounding district from 1911 to 1965. The market disappeared after relocation to Via Lombroso, but Migliorini's glass, iron and ceramic pavilion survived inside a park designed by Luigi Caccia Dominioni; Dario Fo and Franca Rame then made it the home of their La Comune theatrical collective from 1974. Conclude at Teatro Franco Parenti, founded in 1972 as Salone Pier Lombardo by Franco Parenti, Andrée Ruth Shammah, Giovanni Testori, Dante Isella and Gian Maurizio Fercioni during a crisis in Italy's established theater system. Testori's Ambleto, Macbetto and Edipus, performed by Parenti under Shammah's direction, became central works in its early history; the theater assumed Parenti's name after his death in 1989 and reopened in 2008 following Michele De Lucchi's extensive redesign. The progression moves from the Rotonda della Besana's transformation of institutional burial architecture through Migliorini's surviving market pavilion and its later occupation by Fo and Rame into the independent theatrical experiment created by Parenti, Shammah and Testori, tracing successive reinventions of public culture around Porta Romana.
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