Why you should experience Chunk Milano in Milan, Italy.
Chunk Milano is a distinctive smokehouse and cocktail bar where Navigli's canal-side social culture meets American barbecue, a custom smoker and a founding team assembled around chef Francesco Passalacqua, butcher Alberto Masseroni and specialists in fire, wine and spirits.
Set along Ripa di Ticinese near Via Corsico and just steps from Vicolo dei Lavandai, the restaurant occupies the Naviglio Grande's historic towpath, once part of the commercial water route that connected Milan with the Ticino and Lake Maggiore. Exposed brick, timber furniture and dark surfaces give the compact dining room the visual weight of a contemporary smokehouse, with the bar establishing an equally prominent presence beside the kitchen. Outdoor tables extend service directly onto the canal frontage, linking the interior's darker palette with the open movement of the Ripa. The room remains informal enough for burgers and drinks yet substantial enough for long-smoked cuts to function as the center of dinner. The result is a Navigli restaurant whose canal-side position and smokehouse character support a concept built equally around fire and the bar.
What you should know about Chunk Milano.
Chunk Milano is best known for bringing Francesco Passalacqua's accomplished Italian-chef background into a smokehouse created in 2020 with butcher Alberto Masseroni, Stefano Rollo and wine specialist Sergio Spagnolo. Passalacqua was born in Cuneo in 1973, grew up near Alba and trained at the Istituto Alberghiero di Mondovì before working through kitchens including Balzi Rossi, Aimo e Nadia and Cracco Peck; at 26, during his Balzi Rossi period, he won the 2001 Premio Gallo Risotto dell'Anno with Carnaroli, trombetta-zucchini flowers and Sanremo prawns. Milan then became the center of his independent career through Pane e Acqua, which he led from 2008 after earlier work at Cicala02, followed by Esco Bistrò Mediterraneo in Via Tortona in 2015. Chunk placed that classical foundation inside a different operating structure: Masseroni supplied the meat and joined the ownership, Rollo handled barbecue and front-of-house work, Passalacqua directed the kitchen and Spagnolo built a wine selection that initially reached 200 Italian and French labels. The restaurant replaced Maida Mercuri's Rebelot on the Naviglio Grande during the first pandemic year, opening with the name Chunk Smoke and Spirits and a kitchen centered on daily smoking. Its technical centerpiece was a purpose-built barbecue fired with Paraguayan Quebracho Blanco charcoal and smoke generated through cherry, hickory and cedar woods, pairing Masseroni's meat sourcing with Rollo and Passalacqua's fire-driven cooking. Passalacqua subsequently represented Chunk in a Valle d'Aosta Fontina DOP project through a millefoglie of cotechino and alpine Fontina with cime di rapa, carrying his earlier fine-dining technique into the restaurant's meat-centered format. Five years after opening, Chunk narrowed its direction in 2025 toward gourmet burgers, American BBQ, tapas and signature cocktails, marking a clear evolution from the original Smoke and Spirits concept without abandoning the fire cooking that established the restaurant.
Slow cooking gives Chunk's barbecue its central texture, with brisket, pork ribs, Black Angus ribs, pulled pork and pastrami spending extended time around charcoal and aromatic wood before slicing or pulling. The current burger program transfers that meat emphasis into handmade buns: the Chunk combines beef with cheddar, bacon, onion marmalade, lettuce, tomato, fried egg and house sauce, concentrating smokehouse richness with sweetness and acidity. Carbonara turns the burger toward Roman flavors through house-made carbonara sauce and guanciale, and the cacio e pepe version pairs beef and bacon with a sauce built around cheese and pepper. Lomo saltado shifts farther outward through strips of beef, peppers, onion, soy and guacamole, bringing Peruvian references into the bun. Signature cocktails provide the liquid counterpart to the kitchen, continuing a drinks program that was foundational to Chunk from opening and once sat beside natural wines and Birrificio Montegioco beers. Smoke, slow heat, fresh-ground beef, house sauces and mixed drinks keep the current format connected to the fire-and-spirits premise from which Chunk began.
How to fold Chunk Milano into your trip.
Chunk Milano works as the dining anchor for an exploration of the Naviglio Grande that follows the canal's working history from a specialized laundry trade through medieval water transport into the grand religious architecture that developed beside the route.
Begin at Vicolo dei Lavandai, where a narrow watercourse fed by the Naviglio Grande supplied the surviving stone wash stalls used into the twentieth century. The Confraternita dei Lavandai di Milano dates to the eighteenth century, and workers knelt on wooden brellin beside the fossett, scrubbing laundry with palton, a preparation of ash, soap and soda; the male professional washers who originally dominated the trade gave the alley its enduring name before women became more prominent during the twentieth century. Continue to Naviglio Grande, begun during the twelfth century and completed by 1239 before navigation developed by 1272, eventually creating an 50-kilometer commercial artery between Milan and the Ticino. Barges moved stone, timber and other goods toward the city along towpaths that became Ripa di Ticinese and Alzaia Naviglio Grande, integrating this immediate district into a transport network extending through Lake Maggiore toward Central Europe. Conclude at San Cristoforo sul Naviglio, a complex formed from an older Romanesque church and a second building commissioned during the Visconti period, producing the distinctive paired-church composition beside the canal. The site acquired ceremonial importance as rulers and dignitaries approached Milan by water, and its fourteenth-century fabric preserves fresco decoration connected with Lombard Gothic culture at one of the historic gateways into the city. The progression moves from the specialized labor sustained by canal water at Vicolo dei Lavandai through the Naviglio Grande's medieval development as a regional commercial artery into San Cristoforo's fusion of waterborne arrival, Visconti patronage and religious architecture, reconstructing the working canal that preceded the contemporary dining district surrounding Chunk Milano.
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