Why you should experience IYO Omakase in Milan, Italy.
IYO Omakase is an intimate Edomae sushi counter where Porta Nuova's contemporary character meets Claudio Liu's devotion to Japanese cuisine and Masashi Suzuki's Tokyo-born craft, concentrating decades of restaurant experience into a seven-seat encounter built around rice, seasonality, knife work and the direct relationship between sushi master and diner.
Set along Piazza Alvar Aalto near Viale della Liberazione and just steps from Biblioteca degli Alberi, the counter occupies an elevated pedestrian square beneath Torre Solaria within one of Milan's most architecturally ambitious contemporary districts. Maurizio Lai designed the original 320-square-meter IYO Aalto project around contrasting restaurant environments, reserving a separate room for the small sushi counter behind a canaletto-walnut brise soleil overlooking the surrounding towers and park. Poliform Contract produced bespoke furnishings, Marrone executed the sushi counter, kitchen and wine cellar, and Hiproject developed the lighting, placing the tiny dining format inside a highly engineered architectural project. Seven seats now face Suzuki directly, eliminating the spatial separation between preparation and service that defines a conventional dining room. The result is a Porta Nuova restaurant whose architectural intimacy gives Edomae sushi an unusually concentrated stage inside Milan's contemporary skyline.
What you should know about IYO Omakase.
IYO Omakase is best known for Claudio Liu and Masashi Suzuki's creation of Milan's first traditional omakase counter, joining Liu's rise through Japanese fine dining with a sushi master whose professional journey began decades earlier in Japan. Liu was born in Zhejiang in 1982, grew up in Correggio and entered hospitality through his family's Milan restaurant before opening IYO with his wife Ilaria Hu at age 24 in 2007. That restaurant earned a MICHELIN star in the 2015 guide, the first such distinction in Italy for a restaurant outside Italian cuisine, giving Liu the platform for a project devoted much more narrowly to traditional Japanese sushi. Suzuki was born in Tokyo in 1976 and began working young in restaurants in Yamanashi Prefecture, spending his days as a kitchen assistant observing sushi masters and using fish bought at the market to repeat their techniques after work. He moved to Milan in 2001 and passed through the sushi counters of Endo, Sol Levante and Osaka before joining Liu in 2018. Liu opened IYO Omakase in Piazza Alvar Aalto in 2019 as a distinct restaurant beside his new AALTO project, placing Suzuki behind a tiny counter devoted to Tokyo's Edomae-zushi tradition. Gambero Rosso subsequently awarded IYO Omakase Tre Bacchette and named Suzuki among its Maestri del Sushi, honoring chefs whose careers advanced sushi culture in Italy. The same guide gave IYO Omakase its special prize for sushi-and-beverage pairing in 2022. Sommelier Vanessa Simini joined the IYO group that year, earned her Sake Sommelier Association qualification and developed a collection spanning dozens of sake labels across Japanese prefectures. Gambero Rosso's Sushi 2026 guide renewed the Tre Bacchette and awarded IYO Omakase its special prize for Valorizzazione del Sake, connecting Suzuki's decades of sushi training with another specialist discipline inside Liu's smallest restaurant.
Edomae-zushi places seasoned rice at the center of Suzuki's work, with temperature, vinegar balance and compression calibrated to the fish placed above it. Nigiri arrive in an ordered rise through fattiness and umami, allowing leaner seafood to precede richer cuts as Suzuki forms and serves each piece directly across the counter. Sashimi interrupts that rice sequence, and cooked Japanese courses move through steaming and the smoke of a sumibiyaki grill before sushi resumes. The current dinner structure begins with zensai and owan, passes through sashimi and a warm fish preparation, then reaches gindara before nigiri and temaki lead toward dessert and matcha tea. Lunch adds a prawn-and-edamame agemono, red mullet with Jerusalem artichoke and chestnut, grilled seasonal fish, wagyu sirloin and nine daily nigiri. Seasonality governs the seafood Suzuki selects, keeping the fixed structure responsive to what arrives from the sea. Simini's sake pairing develops beside those changes through several pours selected across styles and prefectures, extending the precision of the counter into the glass.
How to fold IYO Omakase into your trip.
IYO Omakase works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing the reinvention of Porta Nuova through environmental art, architecture devoted to twentieth-century civic memory and Michele De Lucchi's sculptural intervention beside Piazza Gae Aulenti.
Begin at Biblioteca degli Alberi, where Dutch studio Inside Outside and Petra Blaisse won Milan's 2004 international competition for a new public park on land later absorbed into the Porta Nuova redevelopment. Before the completed garden opened in 2018, American artist Agnes Denes transformed five hectares of the future site into Wheatfield for Expo 2015, reviving the wheat-field intervention she had first created in Manhattan in 1982 and drawing thousands of Milanese participants into sowing, cultivation and harvest events. Continue to Casa della Memoria, conceived by the Comune di Milano to house organizations devoted to the Resistance, deportation, terrorism and the Piazza Fontana massacre and inaugurated during the seventieth anniversary of Liberation. Stefano Boeri's project gives those histories architectural form through a compact brick building whose exterior carries large-scale portraits and historical images assembled from colored brick pixels, with ANPI, ANED, AIVITER, Associazione Piazza Fontana 12 dicembre 1969 and Istituto Nazionale Ferruccio Parri housed inside. Conclude at IBM Studios, originally inaugurated as UniCredit Pavilion in 2015 after Michele De Lucchi won the architectural competition for a new cultural and meeting space beside Piazza Gae Aulenti. Its larch structural ribs surround a glazed interior, an adaptable auditorium accommodates hundreds of people and two large opening wings connect the building with outdoor events; IBM acquired the pavilion in 2019, giving De Lucchi's structure a second institutional chapter. The progression moves from Denes and Blaisse's transformation of former redevelopment land through Boeri's architecture for Milan's twentieth-century civic memory into De Lucchi's sculptural pavilion for public culture, tracing art, remembrance and architectural experimentation across the rebuilt Porta Nuova district.
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