Why you should experience Izakaya in Milan, Italy.
Izakaya is an enduring Japanese-Chinese restaurant where Porta Nuova's polished urban character meets a compact sushi address that has spent more than fifteen years combining raw seafood, dim sum, noodles, teppanyaki and Japanese fried cooking under one remarkably broad Asian repertoire.
Set along Corso di Porta Nuova near Via Fatebenefratelli and just steps from the Giardini Indro Montanelli, the restaurant occupies the quieter northern approach to Brera between the historic center and the high-rise district beyond Piazza della Repubblica. A compact dining room keeps the tables close to the food's preparation and preserves the intimate proportions that have characterized the restaurant since its earliest years. Sushi boats, small plates and hot dishes create a table that develops incrementally, with raw seafood sharing space with dumplings, grilled skewers and tempura. The restrained interior suits a restaurant whose attraction rests principally on the unusual breadth of cooking produced from its small Corso di Porta Nuova footprint. The result is a Porta Nuova restaurant that compresses several strands of East Asian cooking into a neighborhood address with unusually deep continuity.
What you should know about Izakaya.
Izakaya is best known for maintaining its Corso di Porta Nuova restaurant since 2010, giving the small Japanese-Chinese operation more than fifteen years of continuity in a part of Milan radically altered by the redevelopment of Porta Nuova. The business was established under the Izakaya name at number 34 by Wu Liye and partners, placing a Japanese drinking-house term over a project whose cooking deliberately crossed national boundaries. Japanese sushi and sashimi formed one foundation, but the restaurant simultaneously incorporated Chinese preparations, making the combination part of its character from the beginning of the 2010s. Its compact proportions distinguished it from the large-format Asian restaurants spreading across Milan during the same period, keeping raw seafood, rice preparation and hot cooking within a tightly organized operation. The selection grew into an unusually extensive catalogue spanning nigiri, sashimi, hosomaki, temaki, uramaki, futomaki, gunkan, chirashi and tartare before moving into steamed dumplings, noodles, rice, teppanyaki and fried dishes. Chinese technique enters most clearly through shrimp-and-meat shumai, steamed crystal prawn dumplings and spring rolls, creating a parallel strand beside the Japanese forms. Vietnamese spring rolls broaden that geography again through meat, vegetables and spicy soy noodles. The restaurant's survival through the extraordinary physical redevelopment of nearby Porta Nuova gives the original address particular weight: the skyscraper district rose around the northern end of Corso di Porta Nuova, yet Izakaya remained at the same number through the neighborhood's transformation.
Sunomono establishes the raw-seafood side through mixed fish dressed with Japanese vinegar, using acidity as the principal treatment before rice enters the sequence. Nigiri places sliced salmon, tuna, sea bass, eel, octopus or prawn directly over formed rice, and sashimi removes rice entirely to emphasize the cut of the seafood. Uramaki reverse the construction by placing rice outside the nori, with combinations extending through salmon, avocado, tuna, prawn tempura and other fillings. Gunkan use a band of nori to contain softer toppings above the rice, adding another structural form beside hosomaki, futomaki and hand-rolled temaki. Teppanyaki shifts the repertoire onto direct heat through yakitori glazed with Japanese sauce, prawn skewers, grilled sea bream, salmon and sea bass. Tempura moriawase combines prawns and vegetables inside a lighter fried batter, and tori no karaage develops a denser fried treatment around chicken. Agedashi tofu completes another branch through fried tofu and Japanese sauce, demonstrating how the hot selection extends far beyond the sushi counter.
How to fold Izakaya into your trip.
Izakaya works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing Milan's passage from aristocratic Rococo culture through Enlightenment public-space design into the nineteenth-century institutionalization of natural science around the eastern edge of Porta Nuova.
Begin at Palazzo Dugnani, developed from a seventeenth-century noble residence and transformed during the eighteenth century before Giambattista Tiepolo decorated its grand salon with mythological frescoes. The Dugnani acquired the palace in 1753 and turned it into a meeting place for Milanese intellectual life, with the poetry-focused Accademia dei Fenici establishing its headquarters there in 1762; Giovanni Vimercati later assembled a natural-history collection inside the building before donating the palace and collection to Milan in 1846. Continue to Giardini Indro Montanelli, where Habsburg authorities converted land associated with suppressed religious institutions into Milan's first public garden and entrusted Giuseppe Piermarini with the eighteenth-century scheme. Piermarini organized geometric beds and tree-lined avenues, Giuseppe Balzaretto reshaped and expanded the grounds during the nineteenth century through picturesque planting, water and the incorporation of Palazzo Dugnani, and Emilio Alemagna later modified the park following the exhibitions held there between 1871 and 1881. Conclude at Museo Civico di Storia Naturale, founded in 1838 from naturalist Giuseppe De Cristoforis and botanist Giorgio Jan's collections and opened publicly in 1844 during the Sixth Congress of Italian Scientists. Giovanni Ceruti designed its purpose-built home in the gardens during the 1890s, giving Milan's expanding scientific collections a permanent architectural center after their earlier residence inside Palazzo Dugnani. The progression moves from Tiepolo and the Dugnani family's aristocratic culture through Piermarini, Balzaretto and Alemagna's successive conceptions of public landscape into De Cristoforis, Jan and Ceruti's institutional home for natural science, tracing private collecting, civic space and scientific education across the territory surrounding Porta Nuova.
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