Why you should experience Le Nove Scodelle in Milan, Italy.
Le Nove Scodelle is a convivial Sichuan trattoria where Loreto's multicultural character meets the intensely regional cooking that Agie Zhou developed from childhood memories, family traditions and a deliberate rejection of the generalized Chinese menus once prevalent across Milan.
Set along Viale Monza near Via Padova and just steps from Piazzale Loreto, the restaurant occupies the beginning of a long northeastern artery whose storefronts reveal successive waves of migration and small-scale commerce. A compact upstairs dining room uses handmade wooden tables, stools and pendant lamps shaped like Chinese hats to establish the straightforward proportions of a neighborhood trattoria. Diners gather closely around tables built for several dishes at once, giving the room a communal rhythm that feels particularly natural when groups arrive for dinner. The restrained interior keeps attention on the procession emerging from the kitchen, with little decorative distraction between the dining room and its central purpose. The result is a Loreto restaurant whose intimate scale and communal character make a highly specific regional cuisine feel inseparable from the diverse Milan neighborhood surrounding it.
What you should know about Le Nove Scodelle.
Le Nove Scodelle is best known for Hujian “Agie” Zhou turning his own migration story and an unexpected friendship with Milanese butcher Walter Sirtori into one of the city's most consequential projects devoted to regional Chinese cooking. Zhou was born in rural Zhejiang in 1983, grew up with a grandmother whose handmade dumplings became an enduring childhood memory and moved with his family to Milan in 1996 when they entered the textile trade. He studied economics at Bocconi, completed a master's degree in Madrid and initially intended to continue the family clothing business. Searching for a retail space brought him beside Sirtori's historic butcher shop on Via Paolo Sarpi, where conversations with the butcher redirected his ambitions toward food. Zhou spent ten months developing Ravioleria Sarpi before launching it in December 2015, working with Chinese “aunts” versed in traditional dumpling preparation and using Sirtori's meat for fillings. The neighboring entrepreneurs became close collaborators, and Sirtori helped Zhou choose ingredients and refine early dumpling trials inside the butcher shop. Zhou then sought a project devoted to the domestic cooking of Sichuan. He and his friend and partner Wei acquired a restaurant belonging to Zhou's cousin, then traveled to China with Italian cook Alberto De Marchi to learn inside the homes of aunts, relatives and friends. The group studied cooking techniques and household rituals directly from the people who prepared them, giving the Milan project a foundation in family kitchens. Le Nove Scodelle followed in 2018. Chef Andrea Aprea nominated it for the 2019 TheFork Restaurants Awards, the MICHELIN Guide subsequently included it among its Milan selections, and Gambero Rosso awarded it two Mappamondi. Paolo Marchi brought Zhou onto Striscia la notizia in 2024 to prepare his spicy beef soup, placing a dish developed through this longer migration and apprenticeship journey before a national television audience.
Nine ceremonial bowls give the restaurant its name, drawing on the Chinese association between nine and imperial fortune as well as family banquets built around nine shared dishes. Sichuan pepper supplies the kitchen's distinctive numbing, citrus-edged punctuation beside chili heat. Pollo kongbao balances chicken with peanuts, chili and the pepper's aromatic charge. Manzo in zuppa piccante submerges beef with seasonal vegetables, ginger, chives and abundant chili in a large bowl intended for several diners. Handmade noodles take a quieter route through sesame sauce and Sichuan pepper. Fresh tofu is prepared in-house and paired with soy and sesame, then another tofu preparation reaches the wok with pepper, scallion and ginger. Fermentation receives equal attention: white turnip, carrot and celery spend time in brine, and other vegetables are dried after fermentation before entering wok preparations with pork ragù. Wowo use whole-wheat dough steamed into small breads and filled with fermented vegetables, minced pork, ginger and chili. Italian agriculture feeds those Chinese techniques through producers including Walter Sirtori's butcher operation and the biodynamic Cascine Orsine farm, allowing Zhou's cooking to connect Sichuan preparation with ingredients sourced around Lombardy.
How to fold Le Nove Scodelle into your trip.
Le Nove Scodelle works as the meal stop within an afternoon tracing twentieth-century Milan through private collecting, the Castiglioni brothers' sacred architecture and Gio Ponti's parallel experiments with the modern church.
Begin at Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano, where engineer Antonio Boschi and ceramicist Marieda Di Stefano assembled more than two thousand works and formed close relationships with artists whose work they supported before broader critical recognition arrived. Their apartment sits inside the 1929-1931 building designed by Piero Portaluppi for Marieda's father, Francesco Di Stefano, and his large family. Antonio donated the collection to Milan in stages in 1974 and 1988; 300 works now remain displayed through the rooms where the couple originally lived with them. Continue to Chiesa di San Gabriele Arcangelo in Mater Dei, commissioned during Archbishop Giovanni Battista Montini's campaign to provide new churches for Milan's rapidly expanding postwar districts. Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni began the project in 1956, conceiving a “house among houses” and arranging the church behind a street-facing parish block. FERGAN completed the parish house in 1957 and the church in 1959, bringing the brothers' architectural practice into a sacred commission during the same decade that produced some of their most influential Italian design work. Conclude at Chiesa di San Luca Evangelista, where Gio Ponti worked with Antonio Fornaroli and Alberto Rosselli on another response to Milan's postwar expansion. The parish began in a Via Jommelli apartment whose temporary chapel held only around seventy people before construction of the permanent church started in 1959. Ponti narrowed the rectangular volume toward the altar and gave the entrance an inward-leaning front clad in alternating smooth and diamond-pointed gray ceramic tiles, completing the building in the early 1960s before Cardinal Giovanni Colombo consecrated it in 1966. The progression moves from Boschi and Di Stefano's private commitment to twentieth-century artists through Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni's response to Montini's postwar church campaign into Ponti, Fornaroli and Rosselli's architectural experiment at San Luca, tracing collecting, patronage and sacred design across the districts surrounding Loreto.
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