Why you should experience da Vic in Milan, Italy.
da Vic is an intimate Mediterranean restaurant where Buonarroti's residential elegance meets Vittorio “Vic” Benussi's instinct-led cooking, deeply personal presence and a repertoire that moves freely between seafood, Italian regional traditions and unexpected combinations.
Set along Via Gaetano Previati near Via Alberto Mario and just steps from Piazza Piemonte, the restaurant occupies a composed western Milan pocket shaped by early-twentieth-century residences and the cultural corridor extending toward the former Fiera grounds. Exposed brick walls, timber furnishings and subdued lighting give the compact dining room a warm architectural frame. A limited number of covers keeps Vic physically close to the room, allowing the chef to leave the kitchen and engage directly with diners throughout service. Carefully set tables and an extensive wine collection add polish to surroundings conceived on an intentionally human scale. The result is a Buonarroti restaurant whose physical intimacy makes the chef's presence part of the evening without sacrificing the precision of a serious dining room.
What you should know about da Vic.
da Vic is best known for Vittorio “Vic” Benussi's unusually personal form of Mediterranean cooking, developed outside a conventional chef-school trajectory and governed by combinations he first constructs through taste and accumulated experience. Benussi is both chef and proprietor, giving the restaurant a single creative center that extends from conception of the dishes through cooking and his regular movement into the dining room. His approach became established in Milan during the early 2010s, with the Via Previati restaurant already active by 2011 and Benussi personally directing its food by 2013. The restaurant's second name, Ristorante Guerrini, has remained attached to the operation, yet “da Vic” places the chef's nickname at the front of the public concept and signals how completely his personality governs the establishment. Seafood gradually became one of its strongest culinary fields, and by 2019 the Accademia Italiana della Cucina devoted a Milan Brera convivial gathering to Benussi's cooking, serving his warm octopus with puntarelle, Milanese-style crisp anchovies, spaghetti alla chitarra with Tropea onion, guanciale, pecorino and prawns, and sea-bass roll prepared in beccafico fashion. His recurring creations developed that Mediterranean base through cross-regional ideas: La gricia e il mare connects the Roman pasta tradition with crustaceans, pecorino di fossa and Tropea onion, and tuna tartare acquires an entirely different direction through a mojito preparation. More than a decade into the restaurant's life, Benussi remains in the kitchen and dining room, preserving the direct chef-to-diner relationship on which da Vic was built.
Tuna tartare al mojito begins with raw fish and drives it toward citrus and aromatic freshness through the cocktail reference, creating one of Vic's most recognizable combinations. La gricia e il mare takes guanciale and the pecorino foundation associated with Roman gricia, then introduces crustaceans, pecorino di fossa and Tropea onion so cured pork, shellfish sweetness and aged cheese occupy the same pasta dish. Fiori di zucca carry ricotta and culatello inside the delicate blossoms, bringing a cool dairy filling against cured meat before cooking softens the surrounding flower. Paccheri in viola moves the pasta repertoire toward a more visually assertive preparation, and the fish selection continues through polpo all'isolana and a beccafico treatment that applies the Sicilian preparation to the day's catch. Scallop carpaccio receives olive oil, lemon and pepper with little interference, placing raw seafood at the opposite end of the technique spectrum from crisp breaded anchovies. Carosello dei golosi closes the sequence through several desserts selected by the chef, turning the final course into a compact assortment in the same generous register that characterizes Vic's savory combinations.
How to fold da Vic into your trip.
da Vic works as the dinner endpoint for an afternoon following western Milan through Giuseppe Verdi's final philanthropic project, Giuseppe Sommaruga's Liberty experimentation and a 1920s sports palace absorbed into the former Fiera district.
Begin at Casa Verdi, conceived by Giuseppe Verdi to support professional musicians in old age and designed by Camillo Boito after the composer and Giuseppina Strepponi met the architect in Milan in 1895. Construction followed under the Noseda brothers, the building was completed around the turn of the century and its first residents arrived in 1902 after Verdi's death; Verdi and Strepponi now rest in its crypt, making the building both the physical outcome of his philanthropic plan and his burial place. Continue to Villa Romeo Faccanoni, constructed between 1912 and 1914 by Giuseppe Sommaruga for engineer Luigi Faccanoni, with wrought iron by Alessandro Mazzucotelli and interior decoration by Eugenio Quarti. Automobile entrepreneur Nicola Romeo acquired the villa in 1919, and during the late 1930s Gio Ponti, Antonio Fornaroli and Eugenio Soncini adapted and expanded it for clinical use; two female sculptures by Ernesto Bazzaro that had provoked controversy at Sommaruga's Palazzo Castiglioni survive on the garden façade. Conclude at Palazzo delle Scintille, Paolo Vietti Violi's 1923 indoor sports palace, conceived for large competitions before becoming Pavilion 3 of the Fiera Campionaria. Its sporting history included the 1933 bantamweight world-title boxing match between Panama Al Brown and Domenico Bernasconi, and later exhibition use tied the building directly to the fairgrounds whose redevelopment eventually surrounded the surviving structure with CityLife. The progression moves from Verdi and Boito's purpose-built home for musicians through Sommaruga's Liberty villa and its later architectural conversion into Vietti Violi's arena for mass sport and exhibition, tracing the successive cultural, residential and public ambitions that reshaped western Milan around Buonarroti.
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