Why you should experience Ginmi in Milan, Italy.
Ginmi is a deeply rooted Korean restaurant where Città Studi's residential and academic quarter meets the Ko family's four decades of traditional cooking, multigenerational stewardship and one of Milan's earliest sustained encounters with Korean food culture.
Set along Via Giovanni Paisiello near Via Giovanni Pacini and just steps from Piazza Aspromonte, the restaurant occupies a Città Studi pocket where early-twentieth-century apartment blocks give way to the broad squares and institutional architecture surrounding Milan's university district. The dining room remains deliberately restrained, with closely arranged tables, pale walls and Korean decorative objects placing the emphasis on the family-run character of the operation. Owners working in the kitchen and younger family members handling the dining room preserve a division of roles that gives service the intimacy of a small generational restaurant. Korean greetings and a room filled with the aromas of grilled meat, fermented cabbage and hot stone vessels reinforce the connection between cooking and hospitality. The result is a Città Studi restaurant whose modest physical setting places unusual weight on the continuity of the family and the food it has served for forty years.
What you should know about Ginmi.
Ginmi is best known for the Ko family's establishment of Milan's first Korean restaurant in 1985 and the preservation of traditional Korean home cooking across three generations. The family arrived from South Korea when Ha-Neul “Cielo” Ko was two years old, giving him a childhood divided naturally between Korean food at home and Mediterranean cooking beyond it; visiting the family restaurant as a boy revealed that his parents were serving Milanese and Korean diners essentially the same preparations he knew from their household table. That domestic continuity became his professional education, and Ko describes a highly traditional Korean kitchen as his culinary school before assuming management responsibilities at Ginmi in 2012 as the family's third generation. His later role as chef preserved the restaurant's established repertoire during a period when Korean food moved from relative obscurity in Milan toward broad recognition, with Vogue Italia still crediting the Ko family's 1985 opening as the city's first Korean restaurant four decades later. Gambero Rosso selected Ginmi among Milan's six leading Korean restaurants, singling out both its cooking and service and treating its longevity as foundational to the city's subsequent Korean dining scene. Ko carried that inheritance into a separate project in 2026 when he joined Emanuele Romanelli and Carmine Colucci to create Kiwon, a Korean wine bar exploring contemporary cooking and wine, giving the third generation a second format through which to develop the cuisine he inherited at Ginmi.
Gochugaru travels almost 9,000 kilometers from Korea before entering Ginmi's kitchen, where the red pepper seasons kimchi and soups and connects the cooking directly with ingredients from the family's country of origin. Chinese cabbage for the kimchi is salted, combined with Korean chili and fermented for two weeks, developing acidity and gentle effervescence before appearing alone or throughout cooked preparations. Dolsot bibimbap arrives in a heated stone bowl whose retained heat crisps the rice beneath vegetables, grilled beef and egg, changing the texture as the meal remains against the vessel. House-made mandu enclose pork, vegetables and soy vermicelli in soft wrappers and move between steaming and griddling, the latter producing a crisp browned surface around the filling. Bulgogi reaches the table hot with marinated beef or pork, and kimchi introduces fermented heat into another version intended to be wrapped in lettuce. Hotteok closes the sequence with a hot griddled dough filled with brown sugar, cinnamon and nuts, accompanied by bokbunja raspberry wine for a final combination of caramelized sweetness, spice and fruit.
How to fold Ginmi into your trip.
Ginmi works as the dining anchor for an afternoon exploring the western edge of Città Studi through a private twentieth-century art collection, Piero Portaluppi's interwar residential architecture and Luigi Lorenzo Secchi's ambitious experiment in metropolitan recreation.
Begin at Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano, housed inside the apartment where engineer Antonio Boschi and ceramicist Marieda Di Stefano assembled more than 2,000 works spanning Italian art from the early twentieth century through the 1960s. The couple donated the collection to Milan in 1974, and 300 works now occupy eleven rooms inside the 1929-1931 building designed by Piero Portaluppi, moving through Mario Sironi, Giorgio Morandi, Filippo De Pisis, Lucio Fontana, the Corrente group, Spazialism and Informalism in the domestic rooms where much of the collection originally hung. Continue to Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, designed by Portaluppi after SAIR commissioned a five-story residential building on Viale Lombardia in December 1934 and completed construction through Luigi Gadola's company in 1936. The commission belonged to the bourgeois residential expansion west of Città Studi during a period when this edge of Milan still approached undeveloped land, giving Portaluppi an opportunity to translate the requirements of a middle-class apartment building into one of his mature interwar works. Conclude at Piscina Romano, designed by engineer and architect Luigi Lorenzo Secchi and completed in 1929 as part of Milan's program for new public swimming facilities. Secchi had published his prototype for an outdoor pool in Il Politecnico the previous year; the realized complex centered on a 4,000-square-meter basin designed for 1,500 bathers, translating his research into standardized recreational architecture on an unusually large urban scale. The progression moves from Boschi and Di Stefano's transformation of private collecting into civic cultural patrimony through Portaluppi's response to Città Studi's interwar residential expansion into Secchi's prototype-driven experiment in metropolitan recreation, revealing the artistic, architectural and institutional ambitions that reshaped this part of Milan during the twentieth century.
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