Why you should experience I Love Poke Mercanti in Milan, Italy.
I Love Poke Mercanti is a pioneering Hawaiian fast-casual restaurant where Piazza Mercanti's medieval commercial character meets Rana Edwards and Michael Nazir Lewis's introduction of the modern poke format to Italy, turning a seventeen-square-meter experiment into the birthplace of a national restaurant group.
Set along Passaggio degli Osii beside Piazza Mercanti and just steps from Loggia degli Osii, the restaurant occupies an exceptionally compact space inside the former civic and commercial center of medieval Milan. Its small footprint preserves the physical scale of the founders' original experiment, with preparation organized around the rapid assembly of customized bowls. Rice, grains and salad establish the base before raw fish, vegetables, tropical fruit, garnishes and sauces build vertically inside the bowl, keeping the entire preparation visible. The contrast between contemporary Hawaiian-inspired fast casual dining and the surrounding medieval palaces gives the original branch a context no later expansion reproduces. The result is a Piazza Mercanti restaurant whose tiny dimensions carry unusual significance as the place where Edwards and Lewis introduced their poke concept to the Italian market.
What you should know about I Love Poke Mercanti.
I Love Poke Mercanti is best known for launching Rana Edwards and Michael Nazir Lewis's pioneering attempt to introduce poke to Italy after two markedly different professional journeys converged in Milan. Lewis was born and raised in Milan within a family active in restaurants for more than thirty years, graduated in economics from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in 2010 and attended the London School of Economics the following year before opening Marcellino pane e vino in 2012. Edwards arrived from New York with a scientific background spanning pharmacology, pharmaceutical chemistry and nutrition studies at Harvard, then moved to Milan in 2015 for university research at Bicocca. Her experience there supplied an unexpected catalyst: Italian colleagues devoted considerably more time to lunch than she had experienced in America, leading her to consider a faster format that still combined nutritional balance with a proper meal. Lewis brought restaurant development experience to that idea, and Edwards brought her academic engagement with nutrition. A 2016 trip to California gave the couple direct exposure to the expanding American poke market and sharpened their conviction that the Hawaiian dish had a place in Italy. Edwards became the strongest advocate for testing the idea even though poke remained unfamiliar to much of the Italian public. They chose a seventeen-square-meter space beside Piazza Mercanti and launched I Love Poke there in October 2017, establishing what is recognized as the country's first dedicated poke chain. The experiment expanded with exceptional speed: I Love Poke reached its hundredth restaurant in March 2022 and passed 150 locations by the end of 2025. Lewis received Food Service's 40under40 recognition in 2022, four years after the tiny Mercanti shop began the expansion that placed him among a new generation of Italian restaurant entrepreneurs. The founding couple's complementary backgrounds remain the most consequential feature of that growth, joining Edwards's scientific training and American familiarity with poke to Lewis's Milanese restaurant upbringing and business education.
The original bowl format translates Edwards's nutritional premise into a sequence of choices beginning with rice, quinoa, grains or salad as the foundation. Raw salmon and tuna move the bowl toward the Hawaiian fish tradition, then chicken, shrimp and plant-based proteins open separate routes. Vegetables and tropical fruit bring crispness, acidity and sweetness into the same container, allowing avocado, edamame, mango and other additions to alter both texture and weight. Sauces then bind those ingredients, shifting a bowl toward soy-driven salinity, sesame richness, chile heat or softer creamy combinations. Toppings provide the final contrast through seeds, onions, seaweed and crisp additions placed above the softer rice and fish. The kitchen also offers composed bowls whose proportions remove the decisions from the diner, preserving the nutritional logic Edwards brought into the original concept. Assembly takes one minute, making speed part of the food's construction without separating preparation from the visible ingredients. Mercanti's defining culinary experience remains this movement from a neutral base through protein, produce, sauce and finishing texture, the same modular structure that allowed the seventeen-square-meter original to scale far beyond Piazza Mercanti.
How to fold I Love Poke Mercanti into your trip.
I Love Poke Mercanti works as the meal anchor for an afternoon exploring the surviving architecture of Milan's medieval civic center, where communal government developed into Visconti administration before Sforza-era architecture gave the square another institutional layer.
Begin at Palazzo della Ragione, initiated in 1228 after podestà Aliprando Fava and Milan's General Council decided to create the Broletto Nuovo and completed under Oldrado da Tresseno in 1233. Oldrado remains physically attached to the building through an equestrian relief set into its exterior, and the great upper hall accommodated civic assemblies above a seven-arched ground level used by notaries and bankers, keeping government, justice and commerce together until the old magistracies departed during the eighteenth century. Continue to Loggia degli Osii, rebuilt in 1316 when Matteo Visconti commissioned Scoto da San Gimignano to create a setting for Milan's juridical and notarial activity opposite the communal palace. Magistrates announced edicts from its central parlera, money changers worked beneath its vaults under provisions established in the 1396 statutes, and a 1644 fire preceded centuries of alteration before restoration completed in 1904 recovered much of its medieval appearance. Conclude at Casa dei Panigarola, developed from earlier structures after the Universitas Mercatorum established itself in the square and given a new façade by Giovanni Solari around 1466. The Panigarola family of notaries held the hereditary responsibility for Milan's statute office for centuries, connecting the building with ducal decrees and public acts until the family died out in 1741; Luca Beltrami later intervened during the 1899 restoration. The progression moves from Oldrado da Tresseno's communal palace through Matteo Visconti and Scoto da San Gimignano's juridical loggia into Giovanni Solari and the Panigarola family's Sforza-era institutional architecture, revealing how government, public proclamation and written law successively shaped the tiny square surrounding I Love Poke Mercanti.
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