Why you should experience Fan Wu in Milan, Italy.
Fan Wu is a contemporary Sichuan restaurant where Lazzaretto's early-twentieth-century urban fabric meets a restaurant conceived by the team behind Carnivore Union, ancient Daoist references and a kitchen centered on the aromatic heat and unconventional ingredients of southwestern Chinese cooking.
Set along Viale Tunisia near Via Lazzaretto and just steps from Corso Buenos Aires, the restaurant occupies a Central Milan pocket where the surviving traces of the old quarantine district give way to Liberty architecture and densely built commercial streets. Large street-facing windows bring substantial natural light into an interior organized around pale timber, restrained furnishings and an open arrangement of tables. Calligraphy and graffiti introduce Chinese visual references without overwhelming the room's cleaner architectural treatment. The spacious dining room accommodates the large bowls and shared plates fundamental to the restaurant's cooking, allowing several dishes to occupy the table simultaneously. The result is a Lazzaretto restaurant whose calm contemporary interior provides a deliberately restrained setting for one of Milan's more assertive expressions of Sichuan cooking.
What you should know about Fan Wu.
Fan Wu is best known for arriving in 2018 as a dedicated Sichuan restaurant from the team behind Carnivore Union, expanding work that had already connected its founders with Chinese hot pot and an itinerant black food truck. The opening belonged to a concentrated period when several Sichuan specialists appeared across Milan, giving a regional Chinese cuisine built around dried chilies, fermented ingredients and Sichuan pepper a more distinct presence in the city. Fan Wu differentiated the new venture from Carnivore Union by widening the repertoire beyond hot pot into shared dishes, dumplings, vegetables, seafood and less familiar cuts drawn from Chinese culinary traditions. Its name deepens that cultural direction: ε‘η©, transliterated as Fan Wu, means βordinary thingsβ and references ancient Daoist texts, placing a philosophical idea of ordinary objects behind a restaurant serving ingredients that remained unfamiliar to much of Milan when it opened. The original repertoire made that ambition explicit through frog, liver, pig intestine, duck tongue, chicken feet and century eggs alongside more widely recognized preparations, establishing breadth. Seven years after the opening, Michael Zee selected Fan Wu for The Infatuation's 2025 guide to Milan's best Chinese restaurants, singling out its qianlong cabbage and the ancient numerical formula behind its dressing. The restaurant's path from Carnivore Union's specialized hot-pot operation through a broader Sichuan kitchen and subsequent citywide recognition charts a sustained attempt to give regional Chinese cooking a distinct place in Milan.
Qianlong cabbage begins with raw leaves coated in the traditional 99311 formula: nine parts vinegar, nine honey, three sesame paste, one sugar and one salt, producing a dressing that moves between acidity, sweetness and roasted sesame. Century egg arrives sliced with chili, pairing the preserved egg's dense texture and deep flavor with direct heat. Steamed clams filled with shrimp shift toward seafood, placing the shellfish inside another shellfish preparation before morning glory introduces a vegetable course built around the characteristic hollow-stemmed green. Steamed egg with seafood sauce turns eggs into a softer custard-like base, then duck blood tofu moves into a preparation with a substantially darker mineral register. Flower-cut kidney with leeks and chili depends on knife work as much as seasoning, creating additional surface area for rapid cooking and sauce contact. Handmade shrimp dumplings and pan-grilled dumplings develop the dough repertoire, with the latter joined by the delicate crisp skirt formed from flour and water against the pan. Raw cabbage, preserved egg, shellfish, steamed custard, blood tofu, organ meat and dumpling dough expose the breadth of textures and techniques through which Fan Wu develops its Sichuan-centered cooking.
How to fold Fan Wu into your trip.
Fan Wu works as the dining endpoint for an afternoon through Lazzaretto and Porta Venezia that follows the district from the physical dismantling of Milan's quarantine complex into purpose-built cinema and the elaborate residential architecture created during the neighborhood's rapid redevelopment.
Begin at Palazzo Luraschi, erected in 1887 by engineer Ferdinando Luraschi, former administrator of the nearby Lazzaretto for the Ospedale Maggiore, as the centuries-old quarantine enclosure entered demolition. Luraschi salvaged columns from the disappearing complex and installed them around his new courtyard, then decorated the portico with twelve medallions and busts depicting figures from Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi, preserving both physical fragments of the Lazzaretto and its literary afterlife inside the new city. Continue to Cinema Dumont, constructed between 1908 and 1910 from designs by Ferdinando Tettamanzi and Giovanni Mainetti as one of Italy's early buildings conceived specifically for projected film. The Galli brothers operated a 500-seat auditorium with a waiting room, buffet and first-floor projection booth; after cinematic use ended, later conversions removed much of the original complex, with its Liberty entrance surviving as Biblioteca Venezia. Conclude at Casa Galimberti, commissioned from Giovanni Battista Bossi by brothers Angelo and Emilio Galimberti and constructed between 1903 and 1905 on former Società Anonima degli Omnibus property released after Milan's horse-tram infrastructure became obsolete. Bossi covered 170 square meters of façade with fire-painted ceramic tiles executed by Pio Pinzauti and Ferdinando Brambilla, then integrated wrought iron and molded floral cement into a building equipped with central heating and an elevator. The progression moves from Luraschi physically embedding remnants of the demolished quarantine complex inside a new palace through Tettamanzi and Mainetti designing for the emerging technology of cinema into Bossi and the Galimberti brothers converting obsolete transport land into an elaborate Liberty residence, tracing the rapid reinvention of the streets surrounding Fan Wu.
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