Why you should experience Feel Fusion in Milan, Italy.
Feel Fusion is an intimate Japanese-inspired restaurant where CityLife's contemporary architectural quarter meets a Zhao family hospitality tradition stretching back to one of Milan's early oriental gastronomie, an unusually personal dining room and a fusion repertoire developed long before the term became commonplace across the city.
Set along Viale Severino Boezio near Via Giovanni da Procida and just steps from Piazza Tre Torri, the restaurant occupies the eastern edge of CityLife, where the former Fiera district has been remade through ambitious contemporary architecture and pedestrian public space. Low lighting and candles temper a compact dining room lined with dark brick, producing the residential character that owner Stefano Zhao deliberately describes as his own living room. A small open counter provides a direct visual connection with preparation without dominating the room, preserving the close scale of the tables around it. Zhao has renovated the restaurant three times, with the latest intervention responding to a clientele that changed substantially as CityLife developed across the former fairgrounds opposite. The result is a CityLife restaurant whose subdued physical character provides a deliberate counterpoint to the immense architectural transformation immediately outside.
What you should know about Feel Fusion.
Feel Fusion is best known for turning the Zhao family's early place in Milanese Asian hospitality into a Japanese-led fusion restaurant that has evolved continuously since 2006. Hong Yu Zhao, known as Stefano, grew up inside a restaurant family from Zhejiang, the coastal Chinese province facing the East China Sea; his parents had already established one of Milan's first oriental gastronomie around Moscova three decades before the restaurant described its history. His father and brother opened Feel, with the elder Zhao selecting the Viale Severino Boezio premises for a practical reason that proved consequential to the restaurant's future: its kitchen matched what he wanted for the project, years before CityLife transformed the former fairgrounds opposite. Stefano subsequently took control and developed the restaurant around Asian flavor combinations led strongly by Japanese technique, carrying his family's earlier Milanese food business into a more experimental generation. By 2018 he was established as the restaurant's patron, with the house increasingly distinguished by its extensive roll repertoire; by 2024, specialist Milan dining coverage still placed Zhao at the helm and singled out the coconut-milk-and-curry chicken as one of the reasons for visiting. His stewardship also brought repeated physical reinvention, including three renovations across the restaurant's life as its surrounding district and clientele changed. Nearly two decades after its opening, Feel remains at the original Viale Severino Boezio site, linking a Zhejiang family's first Milanese gastronomy business to a restaurant that matured alongside one of the city's largest twenty-first-century transformations.
Kaory Roll places red prawn beneath mixed fish carpaccio, extra-virgin olive oil, balsamic cream and pepper, pushing a Japanese roll toward ingredients strongly associated with Italian cooking. Foie Gras Roll takes the combination farther through tuna tartare, potato crisps, tuna carpaccio and seared foie gras, layering raw fish, crisp starch and warm richness within a single construction. Lobster 2.0 changes the temperature and texture again through shrimp tempura, avocado carpaccio, seared lobster tartare and tobikko, allowing fried shellfish and lightly cooked lobster to meet against the cool avocado. Salmon Yuzu Roll brings seared salmon, avocado, ikura and miso-yuzu sauce into a sharper citrus register, then Scallop Roll uses diced scallop, lime zest, Tabasco, tobikko and chives to move raw shellfish toward acidity and heat. Mazara del Vallo red prawns also appear as sashimi, placing a prized Sicilian catch into a Japanese cutting format with little intervention. Black cod marinated in miso and sea bass cooked with coconut milk and red curry extend the same approach beyond sushi, connecting Japanese fermentation and Southeast Asian spice with the seafood focus running through Zhao's cooking.
How to fold Feel Fusion into your trip.
Feel Fusion works as the dining endpoint for an afternoon examining the western Fiera and CityLife area through three radically different responses to Milan's twentieth- and twenty-first-century growth: a pioneering sports palace, Rationalist residential experimentation and Zaha Hadid's sculptural housing.
Begin at Palazzo delle Scintille, designed by Paolo Vietti-Violi and inaugurated in April 1923 as Milan's first purpose-built sports palace, then equipped with an indoor cycling track that November as the new Fiera district took shape around it. Its sporting history included the March 1933 bantamweight world-title fight between Panama Al Brown and Domenico Bernasconi, the first boxing match staged in Italy with a world championship at stake; absorbed into the fair as Pavilion 3, the building survived the surrounding demolition and entered a major restoration in 2024 under the Palazzo delle Scintille name. Continue to Casa Rustici, designed by Pietro Lingeri and Giuseppe Terragni between 1933 and 1935 after dismantling sections of Milan's old railway belt released Corso Sempione land for new residential construction. Vittorio Rustici originally wanted a two-story villa, then economic considerations redirected the commission toward apartments; Lingeri and Terragni preserved the owner's private house by lifting it 25 meters above ground between two seven-story blocks, joining the volumes through exposed walkways and creating one of Milanese Rationalism's most inventive residential solutions. Conclude at Residenze Hadid, where Zaha Hadid's studio translated the winning CityLife redevelopment into seven residential buildings begun from 2009 across land vacated when the historic fair moved to Rho-Pero. Staggered curving balconies, inclined rooflines, rounded windows and façades combining fiber-cement panels with natural wood vary across buildings rising between five and twelve floors, carrying Hadid's fluid geometries from urban plan into domestic architecture. The progression moves from Vietti-Violi's 1923 palace for mass sport through Lingeri and Terragni's elevation of a private villa above a Rationalist apartment complex into Hadid's curving residential blocks on the former Fiera grounds, compressing a century of Milanese experimentation with large-scale urban change around Feel Fusion.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Experience premium editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
