Why you should experience Il Santo Bevitore in Milan, Italy.
Il Santo Bevitore is a cultivated Italian restaurant where Sarpi's cosmopolitan character meets a dining room shaped by successive European influences, moving from its Belgian-Swiss beginnings through Savio Bina's fine-dining wine expertise into a contemporary kitchen built around seasonal Italian cooking and an unusually deep cellar.
Set along Via Aleardo Aleardi near Via Luigi Canonica and just steps from Arena Civica, the restaurant occupies a quieter western pocket of the Sarpi district between Chinatown and Parco Sempione. Modern furnishings sit against retro details, preserving the intimacy of the small restaurant even as its culinary direction has changed substantially across more than two decades. Wine remains physically and conceptually prominent, with more than 200 labels extending the restaurant's original European drinking culture into its current Italian format. Monthly changes in the kitchen allow seasonal produce to redirect the food without severing its connection to regional cooking. The result is a Sarpi restaurant whose present character carries traces of several distinct culinary chapters accumulated inside the same Via Aleardi address.
What you should know about Il Santo Bevitore.
Il Santo Bevitore is best known for passing through an unusual succession of European culinary chapters, beginning with Belgian Graziella and her Swiss husband Filippo Combe before the restaurant entered the hands of sommelier Savio Bina. Graziella and Combe created the original restaurant around 1999, combining their national backgrounds inside a northern-European-inflected room whose cooking moved through snails, mussels and duck. Fondue supplied its most distinctive early specialty: fondue chinoise arrived with broth, beef and ten sauces, Swiss cheese fondue incorporated kirsch and white wine, and chocolate fondue carried the same communal format into dessert. The restaurant subsequently entered a very different professional chapter under Bina, whose career had already passed through Carlo Cracco and Giancarlo Perbellini. Bina worked as a sommelier at Ristorante Perbellini in Isola Rizza, bringing experience from one of Italy's major fine-dining kitchens into the tiny Via Aleardi restaurant. His tenure redirected Il Santo Bevitore toward the relationship between food and wine, with individual glasses selected around dishes and a more ambitious cellar becoming central to the restaurant's character. By late 2009 Bina had departed, beginning another change in stewardship without ending the name or address established during the earlier European chapters. The following years moved the cooking toward Italian regional traditions treated with eccentric touches, accompanied by produce sourced from fair-trade and sustainability-oriented suppliers. Its current incarnation retains that Italian focus and rebuilds dishes monthly around seasonal ingredients, with a cellar exceeding 200 labels preserving the wine-centered strand strengthened during Bina's period. More than a quarter-century after Graziella and Combe established the original concept, the restaurant's significance lies in that continuity through change: Swiss fondue, Belgian influence, a fine-dining sommelier and contemporary Italian cooking have occupied successive chapters under one name on Via Aleardi.
Seasonality now supplies the organizing principle for the kitchen, with monthly changes allowing vegetables, meat and seafood to redirect preparations across the year. Earlier Italian dishes reveal how that method developed, pairing sea and land through ravioli filled with sea bass and accompanied by scampi, or grouper ravioli finished with scorpionfish sauce. Garganelli alla finta carbonara moved toward a reinterpretation of a familiar pasta form, establishing the kitchen's preference for recognizable Italian references altered through composition. Duck breast with apple vinegar shifted the same approach into meat, using fruit acidity against the bird's richness. Tagliata di manzo with lardo di Colonnata deepened that richness through cured pork fat, then cotoletta alla palermitana changed the expected fried preparation by moving breaded meat onto the grill. Wine extends those changes through a cellar of more than 200 labels, allowing lighter bottles to accompany seafood before fuller expressions enter beside duck or beef. The kitchen's character emerges through that continuous movement between regional familiarity and selective alteration, with the cellar providing the thread that binds changing monthly dishes into the restaurant's long-established food-and-wine focus.
How to fold Il Santo Bevitore into your trip.
Il Santo Bevitore works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing the territory north of Parco Sempione through Milanese funerary architecture, industrial transport production and the institutional rise of Italian design.
Begin at Cimitero Monumentale, where Milan launched a competition for a new cemetery in 1860 and selected Carlo Maciachini, a woodcarver from Induno Olona who pursued architectural studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera before becoming one of nineteenth-century Milan's major architects. His project received final approval in 1863, burials began in 1866, the central ossuary followed in 1873 and the Famedio completed the principal entrance composition in 1887, establishing a vast funerary complex subsequently filled with commissions by generations of architects and sculptors. Continue to Fabbrica del Vapore, where Antonio Carminati, Giuseppe Pozzi and Carlo Toselli founded Carminati, Toselli & C. in 1899 to build and repair railway and tram rolling stock. The company expanded into Società Italiana Carminati Toselli in 1907, employed 1,350 workers by 1919 and produced the first prototype of Milan's model 1928 tram, developed by municipal engineers D'Alòi and Cuccoli from the American Peter Witt concept; more than 500 followed before the company ceased activity in 1935. Conclude at ADI Design Museum, where the Compasso d'Oro collection carries Milan's industrial culture into postwar design. La Rinascente established the prize in 1954 from an idea by Gio Ponti and Alberto Rosselli, Albe Steiner created its graphic symbol, and ADI assumed stewardship after its 1956 foundation by figures including Marco Zanuso, Ignazio Gardella, Vico Magistretti, Bruno Munari and Gillo Dorfles. The collection now encompasses more than 2,300 awarded or honored projects inside former industrial buildings once used for Milanese trams and later by Enel. The progression moves from Maciachini's nineteenth-century architecture for civic remembrance through Carminati Toselli's engineering of Milanese tram production into Ponti, Rosselli, Steiner and ADI's elevation of industrial design into a national cultural discipline, tracing architecture, manufacturing and authored design across the western edge of Sarpi.
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