Why you should experience La Griglia di Varrone in Milan, Italy.
La Griglia di Varrone is a fire-driven steakhouse where Porta Garibaldi's contemporary energy meets Massimo Minutelli's global pursuit of exceptional beef, Diego Perusko's elemental design and a grand oak-fired grill inspired by Victor Arguinzoniz's Asador Etxebarri.
Set along Via Alessio di Tocqueville near Corso Como and just steps from Piazza Gae Aulenti, the restaurant occupies the transition between the pedestrian nightlife streets around Porta Garibaldi and the towers that radically redrew northern Milan's skyline. Designer Diego Perusko built the interior around oak, iron and stone, using charcoal-dark surfaces, changes between matte and polished finishes and illuminated display cases that present individual cuts almost like objects in a boutique. The enormous open grill commands the room from its central position, placing burning oak, hanging extraction equipment and the cooks working over live fire directly within the diner's field of view throughout the meal. That arrangement gives an otherwise restrained dining room a visible source of movement and heat, with the architecture repeatedly pulling attention back toward the cooking process. The result is a Porta Garibaldi restaurant where fire, architectural restraint and an unusually visible collection of international beef make the grill itself part of the evening.
What you should know about La Griglia di Varrone.
La Griglia di Varrone is best known for Massimo Minutelli's transformation from a gastronomic newcomer into a specialist who built his restaurant around beef encountered through international travel and the live-fire cooking of Victor Arguinzoniz. Born in 1965 and originally from Liguria's Riviera di Ponente, Minutelli had already worked as an entrepreneur in other sectors when he entered restaurants with no professional culinary background. His original Lucca location sat beside a seafood restaurant belonging to a friend, and Minutelli deliberately chose meat to avoid competing directly with him. A trip to Spain supplied the more consequential breakthrough when Asador Etxebarri in Atxondo exposed him to Arguinzoniz's method of cooking diverse ingredients over fire and to Rubia Gallega beef. Minutelli created the first La Griglia di Varrone in Lucca in 2006, pursuing American, Spanish, Australian, Japanese and Italian cattle at a time when the Tuscan steakhouse model remained strongly associated with Chianina and bistecca alla fiorentina. Expansion reached Pisa in December 2011 through a partnership involving entrepreneur Patrizio Rofrano and actor Roberto Farnesi, then Milan followed in 2014 as Minutelli's most ambitious expression of the concept. He asked an Italian blacksmith named Mauro to hand-build the Milan grill after the Etxebarri model, feeding it exclusively with oak and making it the physical center of the restaurant. Friend and designer Diego Perusko developed the surrounding interior, translating Minutelli's parallel interest in design into oak, iron and stone. Tony Melillo became director of the Milan restaurant and joined Minutelli at Identità Golose in 2019 to present their approach to different breeds, cuts and cooking methods. Alessandro Borghese subsequently selected the restaurant for a Milan episode of 4 Ristoranti devoted to grilled meat, placing Minutelli's oak-fired cooking before a national television audience. More than a decade after the Milan opening, the project still follows the premise born from his travels: locate distinctive breeds and producers, understand how their fat, age and muscle structure respond to heat, then determine the preparation appropriate to the individual cut.
The grill translates that premise through oak fire, with separate cuts occupying positions suited to their thickness, fat and required heat. Spanish buey brings Rubia Gallega, Cachena and Sayaguesa cattle aged between seven and fifteen years, sourced through José and Miguel of Gutrei Galicia Roxa D'Ouro after animals have spent years grazing outdoors. Japanese Wagyu changes the equation through dense intramuscular fat, requiring a smaller portion and controlled exposure to heat so the marbling liquefies. Black Angus from the United States and Australia introduces another structure of fat and tenderness, with rib-eye, picanha, entraña and other cuts allowing the fire to act differently across exterior fat, muscle fibers and exposed surface. Iberian pork extends Minutelli's sourcing into Extremadura through the Gómez family, with whom he has maintained a relationship for thirteen years and whose 150th-anniversary gala he attended among the oak pastures where acorn-fed pigs are raised. Pastrami places Black Angus inside pan de cristal, and tacos shift picanha, long-cooked coda alla vaccinara or Japanese Wagyu into smaller street-food preparations. Bone marrow reaches the table with hot bread, moving the meal toward concentrated roasted fat before the larger steaks arrive. The cooking remains unified by direct heat, smoke and careful control of fat, allowing cattle breed, animal age, cut and provenance to determine how the oak fire is used.
How to fold La Griglia di Varrone into your trip.
La Griglia di Varrone works as the dinner anchor for a Porta Garibaldi itinerary connecting a nineteenth-century customs gate, postwar railway architecture and Herzog & de Meuron's twenty-first-century home for one of Milan's major cultural foundations.
Begin at Porta Garibaldi, where Giacomo Moraglia replaced the earlier Porta Comasina with a Doric triumphal arch between 1826 and 1828 after Luigi Cagnola's more expensive proposal was abandoned under Austrian rule. Giovanni Battista Perabò supplied colossal figures representing the Po, Adda, Ticino and Olona, and customs houses followed during the 1830s; the gate entered another political chapter when Milanese audaciouss captured it during the Five Days in 1848 and Giuseppe Garibaldi entered through it in 1859 after victories at Varese and San Fermo. Continue to Stazione di Porta Garibaldi, born from a 1956 competition in which Giulio Minoletti and Eugenio Gentili Tedeschi's team tied with a Roman group. Their initial scheme proposed a tall passenger tower over a prestressed-concrete railway base, but the collaborators radically revised the project, integrating iron structure with architecture and anticipating connections with metro, bus and even heliport transport. Conclude at Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, where Herzog & de Meuron designed a sharply pitched linear building inaugurated in 2016 along Viale Pasubio. Its five above-ground floors give the foundation 2,700 square meters for archives, study, seminars and performance, capped by a reading room beneath the steep roof that turns the building's structural frame into its dominant architectural rhythm. The progression moves from Moraglia and Perabò's conversion of Milan's former defensive perimeter into a ceremonial customs entrance through Minoletti and Gentili Tedeschi's postwar transportation experiment into Herzog & de Meuron's architectural home for the Feltrinelli cultural institution, tracing civic infrastructure, mobility and intellectual life across Porta Garibaldi.
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