Why you should experience IYO in Milan, Italy.
IYO is a pioneering Japanese restaurant where Sempione's cosmopolitan character meets Claudio Liu and Ilaria Hu's ascent from a young family venture into the first Japanese restaurant in Italy to earn a MICHELIN star, joining exacting sushi craft with contemporary cooking and an increasingly ambitious architectural setting.
Set along Via Piero della Francesca near Corso Sempione and just steps from Piazza Damiano Chiesa, the restaurant occupies the address Liu and Hu chose for their independent venture in their early twenties. Maurizio Lai's 2024 redesign expanded the premises to 800 square meters, using natural walnut, Patagonia marble, steel and textured fabrics across a dining room organized around a ten-meter sushi counter and visible robata. Dedicated fish and pastry laboratories give specialist preparations their own working environments, and private rooms extend the restaurant beyond the open dining floor. Acoustic engineering by Ezio Rendina and Viva Consulting accompanied the reconstruction, controlling sound across the substantially enlarged interior. The result is a Sempione restaurant whose physical evolution expresses the precision and scale reached by a project that began with a 24-year-old restaurateur's first independent address.
What you should know about IYO.
IYO is best known for Claudio Liu's progression from his immigrant family's Milanese restaurant into an independent Japanese project that became the first non-Italian restaurant in Italy to receive a MICHELIN star. Born in Zhejiang in 1982 and raised in Emilia, Liu entered hospitality through his parents' restaurant Acquario on Via Raffaello Sanzio, where his father spent a year observing the operation as a dishwasher, his mother worked behind the bar and Claudio handled the dining room before siblings Giulia and Marco joined the family business. Japanese cooking fascinated him enough that at 23 he began searching for his own premises, finding Via Piero della Francesca with his wife Ilaria Hu in 2006 and launching IYO the following year at 24. Japanese master Haruo Ichikawa joined in 2008 after years working across Japan, New York, Europe and Milan, bringing a deeply trained sushi practice into a restaurant Liu was pushing beyond the conventional sushi-fusion model. Italian chefs subsequently entered the kitchen, Lorenzo Lavezzari followed by Michele Biassoni, creating a parallel culinary strand beside Ichikawa's counter, and IYO established an internal pastry section in 2014. Gambero Rosso awarded the restaurant its highest three-Mappamondi distinction that year after IYO's chefs had already achieved consecutive victories at Girotonno in 2013 and 2014. MICHELIN awarded IYO a star in its 2015 guide, an unprecedented distinction in Italy for a restaurant outside Italian cuisine, and the star has remained with the Via Piero della Francesca restaurant ever since. Liu expanded his ambitions again in 2019 with IYO Omakase and AALTO in Piazza Alvar Aalto, the latter receiving its own MICHELIN star in the 2021 guide. A comprehensive 2024 reconstruction by Maurizio Lai then recast the original IYO after seventeen years, bringing Simone Tricarico into the executive team beside Katsumi Soga and pastry chef Luca De Santi and giving the restaurant a new technical platform for its next chapter.
Ika somen turns squid into noodle-like strands through kanoko bouchyou knife work, combining the delicate cut with quail yolk, Kaluga caviar and soba sauce built on dashi. Hotate usuzukuri slices Hokkaido scallop into carpaccio and sharpens its sweetness through yuzu vinaigrette, umeboshi and red shiso powder. The three-tuna tartare separates bluefin into akami, chu-toro and o-toro, allowing lean, semi-fatty and fatty cuts to occupy the same preparation beside fresh spring onion and wasabi. Robatayaki, introduced prominently into the reconstructed kitchen, opens a separate path through live-fire cooking, with pigeon paired with confit kombu, daikon and sesame among the preparations developed after the renovation. Wagyu gyoza compress rich beef inside delicate dumpling wrappers and balances it with vegetable and soy emulsion, becoming one of the longstanding dishes MICHELIN itself singles out among IYO's signatures. Nigiri moves through sea bass, scallop, king crab and tuna belly, preserving the direct relationship between fish and rice beside the kitchen's more constructed plates. Luca De Santi's dedicated pastry operation completes the sequence through a discipline that IYO first brought inside the restaurant in 2014, giving dessert the same specialist infrastructure now devoted to fish preparation and sushi.
How to fold IYO into your trip.
IYO works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing Milan's movement from Renaissance aristocratic retreat through the rebellious housing experiments of Italian Rationalism into the institutional architecture that gave modern artists a permanent exhibition center.
Begin at Villa Simonetta, whose earliest nucleus arose for Gualtiero Bascapè, chancellor to Ludovico il Moro, on agricultural land purchased from the Ospedale Maggiore before Ferrante Gonzaga acquired the property in 1547 and commissioned Domenico Giunti to turn it into a grand suburban residence. Giunti added lateral wings to create the U-shaped plan, developed the imposing façade and oversaw a decorative campaign celebrating the Gonzaga family; after wartime bombing devastated the building, municipal restoration beginning in 1959 eventually prepared it for its current role as the Civica Scuola di Musica Claudio Abbado. Continue to Casa Rustici, where Vittorio Rustici abandoned his original plan for a two-story private villa and commissioned Pietro Lingeri and Giuseppe Terragni to develop a more economically viable apartment building between 1933 and 1935. The architects divided the trapezoidal site into two principal blocks linked by exposed walkways and raised Rustici's own villa 25 meters above the street as the penthouse, producing one of the most inventive Milanese works associated with Rationalism. Conclude at Palazzo della Permanente, created after two Milanese art societies merged in 1883 and commissioned Luca Beltrami to design their new exhibition headquarters, inaugurated in 1886 with galleries, sculpture spaces and a hall for concerts and conferences. Bombing in August 1943 left Beltrami's Via Filippo Turati façade standing but devastated much of the interior, prompting Pier Giacomo and Achille Castiglioni with Luigi Fratino to reconstruct the exhibition spaces before the institution reopened in 1953. The progression moves from Bascapè, Gonzaga and Giunti's conversion of agricultural land into a Renaissance residence through Rustici, Lingeri and Terragni's experiment with modern urban housing into Beltrami and the Castiglioni brothers' successive architectures for Milanese art, tracing patronage, residential invention and cultural institution-building across the districts surrounding Sempione.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Experience premium editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
