Why you should experience Il Mannarino Fiamma in Milan, Italy.
Il Mannarino Fiamma is a convivial butcher-shop restaurant where Porta Venezia's residential character meets Filippo Sironi and Gianmarco Venuto's revival of the southern Italian fornello, placing the butcher back between diner and grill through a format born from friendship, a formative Puglian journey and the meat traditions of the Valle d'Itria.
Set along Via Galvano Fiamma near Viale Premuda and just steps from Piazza Tricolore, the restaurant occupies a neighborhood of early twentieth-century residences between Porta Venezia and the eastern bastions. The butcher counter commands the room before the table does, making the selection of meat a visible opening act and carrying the project's bottega origins directly into dinner. Open grilling continues that physical sequence as chosen cuts leave the counter for fire, preserving a relationship between butcher, product and diner that Sironi and Venuto built into the format. Green and yellow accents, timber furnishings and ceramic details connect the Fiamma branch with the visual language developed across the wider group. The result is a Porta Venezia restaurant whose physical choreography preserves the original idea behind Il Mannarino: choose with a butcher, watch the preparation and eat the finished cut at the table.
What you should know about Il Mannarino Fiamma.
Il Mannarino Fiamma is best known for extending Filippo Sironi and Gianmarco Venuto's reinterpretation of the Puglian fornello, an idea whose origins reach back to their friendship long before Il Mannarino became a multi-city restaurant group. Sironi and Venuto met during their first year of secondary school, later completing university studies in economics and architecture respectively before pursuing early professional careers on parallel tracks. Venuto brought a direct Puglian connection to the partnership through his origins in Foggia, and a trip through Puglia with Sironi and their early collaborator Luca Ballabio supplied the decisive encounter with the region's butcher shops, where meat selected at the counter passes directly to the grill. Ballabio arrived with substantial food-retail experience of his own, having launched the Sushi Shabu Japanese restaurant chain in Liguria at nineteen. The three translated the Valle d'Itria fornello into their first Milanese Il Mannarino in Piazza De Angeli in June 2019, naming the project after the small cleaver traditionally associated with the butcher's trade. That first shop generated more than €600,000 in revenue during its opening period and was followed by Via Carlo Tenca before the pandemic forced both restaurants to close their dining rooms. Sironi, Venuto and Ballabio responded in March 2020 by developing an e-commerce operation within 48 hours, converting waiters into packing and delivery staff and reaching 600 daily orders in Milan during the early surge. The business had raised €500,000 in private seed investment during its first phase, then reached €7 million in 2021 revenue as Sironi and Venuto accelerated expansion beyond the original two shops. Fiamma became part of that Milanese expansion, preserving the same butcher-led model at Via Galvano Fiamma as the company spread through Lombardy and later into other Italian regions. By 2024 the group had reached sixteen butcher shops with kitchens, and in 2025 Il Mannarino won the Foodservice Awards Local Hero prize before UniCredit and Mediocredito Centrale subscribed a €4.75 million minibond alongside €3 million in financing for its next growth phase. A project inspired by a Puglian trip had reached twenty locations across four regions by that point, carrying Sironi and Venuto's original neighborhood-butcher premise into a national restaurant business.
Bombette preserve the clearest culinary connection with the Valle d'Itria, beginning with thin pork capocollo wrapped around canestrato cheese before the small parcels meet the grill. The Classica keeps that construction close to its Puglian reference point, then the Pancettata wraps the exterior in pancetta so rendered fat changes both browning and richness over the fire. Bronte pushes the same compact form toward pistachio, and Piccante brings chile into the filling, allowing one butcher-shop preparation to change. Panata alters the exterior through rustic breadcrumbs around pork and canestrato, introducing a crisp shell before the softer cheese center. The butcher counter then expands the fire-led meal into Fiorentina, arrosticini, zampina sausage and knife-cut sausage scented with wild fennel, shifting from filled pork parcels toward whole cuts, skewers and coarse-ground meat. Polpette della nonna move away from the grill through slow cooking in tomato sauce, providing a softer endpoint after the char and rendered fat of the butcher selections. Il Mannarino Fiamma consequently turns the act of choosing meat into the organizing principle of dinner, with cutting, filling, skewering, grilling and slow cooking revealing different possibilities from the same butcher-led tradition.
How to fold Il Mannarino Fiamma into your trip.
Il Mannarino Fiamma works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing eastern Milan from exuberant Liberty experimentation through the redevelopment of former horse-tram land into one of the city's richest architectural districts and onward to Piero Portaluppi's rebellious domestic modernism.
Begin at Casa Galimberti, where brothers Angelo and Emilio Galimberti commissioned Giovanni Battista Bossi to build their apartment house between 1903 and 1905 on land released after demolition of the Società Anonima degli Omnibus facilities. Bossi covered more than 170 square meters of façade with fire-painted ceramic figures produced by Pio Pinzauti and Ferdinando Brambilla, then joined them with floral cement work and elaborate iron balconies, turning former transport land into one of Milanese Liberty's most ambitious residential surfaces. Continue to Casa Guazzoni, built nearby between 1904 and 1906 when master builder Giacomo Guazzoni commissioned Bossi and also executed the construction himself. Tarcisio Pogliani produced models for the sculptural cement decoration, Paolo Sala contributed painted work and Alessandro Mazzucotelli created wrought iron, bringing architecture, sculpture, painting and metalwork into a single residential commission on another portion of the former horse-tram site. Conclude at Villa Necchi Campiglio, commissioned by industrialists Angelo Campiglio and sisters Gigina and Nedda Necchi from Piero Portaluppi and completed in 1935. Portaluppi designed the residence, garden, gatehouse, greenhouse, garage, tennis court and private heated pool as one project before Tomaso Buzzi began modifying interiors in 1938; the sisters later left the property to FAI, which reopened it as a house museum in 2008 after a three-year restoration. The progression moves from Bossi and the Galimberti brothers' ceramic-clad transformation of former tram land through Guazzoni, Pogliani, Sala and Mazzucotelli's synthesis of Liberty crafts into Portaluppi and Buzzi's successive visions for the Necchi Campiglio residence, tracing three increasingly comprehensive experiments in Milanese domestic design.
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