Ichimi, Milan

Why you should experience Ichimi in Milan, Italy.

Ichimi is a relaxed Japanese restaurant where Porta Romana's residential character meets Jianwei Hu's long-running approach to sushi, combining traditional raw-fish formats with flame-seared seafood, tempura, dumplings and inventive house constructions developed across more than fifteen years on the same Milanese corridor.

Set along Corso di Porta Romana near Via Orti and just steps from Crocetta, the restaurant occupies the historic southern route that once carried movement between Milan's center and the city gate farther down the corso. The dining room keeps sushi visually central through closely arranged tables and contemporary Japanese references, supporting a meal that shifts easily between small individual pieces and larger shared compositions. Raw seafood provides the visual focus before fried, grilled and wok-cooked plates introduce stronger changes in heat and texture. That breadth gives groups considerable freedom without displacing the sushi repertoire that anchors the restaurant. The result is a Porta Romana address whose longevity and range make it a dependable expression of Milan's neighborhood Japanese dining culture.

What you should know about Ichimi.

Ichimi is best known for Jianwei Hu's sustained development of a Japanese restaurant on Corso di Porta Romana that has remained under his name since the project's earliest years. Hu established the business in 2009, placing Ichimi among the Japanese restaurants that took root in Milan during the city's rapid expansion of sushi culture around the turn of the following decade. The restaurant subsequently became closely associated with number 111, where Hu developed a repertoire broad enough to connect Japanese sushi forms with a secondary strand of Chinese and wider East Asian cooking. Sushi remained the central discipline as the selection expanded through sashimi, nigiri, chirashi, hosomaki, temaki and gunkan, creating multiple treatments of seafood and seasoned rice inside the same operation. House creations supplied a more individual branch, including Ichimi Maki and constructions that wrap salmon, avocado, mango and cream cheese inside thin sheets of daikon. Tamago Fu pushed the experimentation into another form through an egg pouch filled with prawn, tobiko, apple and mayonnaise. Flame treatment became another recurring technique, with salmon briefly exposed to heat before being paired with avocado, courgette flower and the restaurant's sauce. Ichimi also developed a substantial cooked repertoire encompassing tempura, grilled fish, noodles, rice and dumplings, giving Hu a format able to accommodate Japanese raw-fish traditions beside hot East Asian cooking. More than fifteen years after Hu began the project, Ichimi continues at the same Corso di Porta Romana address, making continuity itself consequential to a restaurant established during an earlier phase of Milan's embrace of Japanese dining.

Salmon provides the clearest route through Ichimi's changing treatment of raw fish, beginning as sashimi where knife work and temperature leave the fish largely unadorned. Tartare changes its physical character through fine cutting, and nigiri brings seasoned rice beneath the same fish to introduce warmth, vinegar and compression. The flame-finished salmon roll then adds brief surface heat before avocado, courgette flower and sauce push the preparation toward richer contrasts. Daikon Rolls change the wrapper itself, enclosing salmon, avocado, mango and cream cheese in translucent radish in place of conventional nori. Tamago Fu continues that movement away from familiar sushi construction by using an egg pouch around prawn, tobiko, apple and mayonnaise, bringing sweetness and the popping texture of roe into a compact parcel. Tempura introduces sustained heat and a brittle fried coating, then grilled seafood carries the meal toward deeper roasted flavors. Ichimi consequently builds its strongest culinary thread by repeatedly changing the structure surrounding seafood, allowing cutting, rice, flame, radish, egg and frying to alter texture without losing fish as the central reference.

How to fold Ichimi into your trip.

Ichimi works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing the southern center through Renaissance philanthropy, centuries of hospital history and the Baroque architecture created to accommodate Milan's dead.

Begin at Giardino della Guastalla, created through Paola Ludovica Torelli, Countess of Guastalla, who sold her feudal territory to the Gonzaga and devoted part of the resulting fortune to educating young women in Milan. Her Collegio della Guastalla acquired its site in the 1550s, and the adjoining Italian garden developed with a Baroque fishpond, a seventeenth-century devotional aedicule and a neoclassical temple by Luigi Cagnola before Renzo Gerla and Gaetano Fassi reshaped the grounds for public use in the late 1930s. Continue to Ca' Granda, commissioned by Francesco Sforza in 1456 as Milan's great hospital and entrusted to Florentine architect Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete. Guiniforte Solari and Giovanni Antonio Amadeo subsequently advanced the vast complex, whose courtyards and terracotta façades carried Sforza patronage into an institution that remained tied to Milanese medicine for centuries before becoming the principal historic seat of the University of Milan. Conclude at Rotonda della Besana, created when the Ospedale Maggiore required greater burial capacity for its dead. Construction began in 1695 under Arrisio Arrigoni, the first burials followed in 1697, and Francesco Croce helped develop the great lobed portico between 1719 and 1731 after inadequate capacity and water infiltration demanded a larger solution; wealthy silk merchant Giambattista Annone helped finance its completion. The progression moves from Torelli's sixteenth-century educational philanthropy through Sforza and Filarete's hospital foundation into the burial architecture created for the Ospedale Maggiore, tracing charity, medicine and mortality through institutions that shaped this quarter of Milan.

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