Why you should experience Le vie di Taipei in Milan, Italy.
Le vie di Taipei is a Taiwanese restaurant where Repubblica's metropolitan setting, chef Chang Hui Pi's cooking and the street-food traditions of Taipei converge through a project that has deliberately recreated the food culture of Taiwan in Milan.
Set along Via Luigi Razza near Via Vittor Pisani and just steps from Piazza della Repubblica, the restaurant occupies a central pocket between the grand railway district and the office and residential towers that reshaped northern Central Milan during the twentieth century. Lanterns, wood, greenery and shelves of Taiwanese products create a compact dining room whose current restraint follows an earlier incarnation built much more explicitly around the streets of Taipei. The food preserves that original premise through noodles, rice, steamed and griddled breads, dumplings, braised pork, Taiwanese sausage and traditional sweets. The result is a Repubblica restaurant where a highly specific regional repertoire carries the food of Taiwanese streets into a part of Milan shaped by international movement.
What you should know about Le vie di Taipei.
Le vie di Taipei is best known for presenting Taiwanese street cooking as a distinct culinary tradition in Milan, an ambition that began with a dramatically literal recreation of Taipei before evolving into the restaurant led by chef Chang Hui Pi today. Its first Milanese incarnation appeared near Chinatown on Via Canonica at the beginning of 2020, with an interior conceived as an indoor Taiwanese street. Maps resembling digital city plans covered floors and tables. Painted buildings, illuminated signs and streets extended across the walls, and a row of individual food stalls gave different preparations their own stations. The opening menu was correspondingly concentrated, centering on rice cakes, fried rice, rice noodles and other preparations associated with Taiwanese street eating. The timing proved formidable: the restaurant had barely begun service when Milan entered the COVID-19 emergency, and the business operating under the Le vie di Taipei name was affected during the spring 2020 shutdown. The project survived that interruption and later left its original Chinatown setting. By early 2025 it had established a new home on Via Luigi Razza, replacing the street-map theatricality with a smaller dining room and a substantially expanded culinary repertoire. A proprietor known to customers as Betty remains a conspicuous presence in the room, explaining the origins of unfamiliar preparations and their place in Taiwanese food culture. Chef Chang Hui Pi now leads the kitchen, with the restaurant's contemporary selection reaching far deeper than its compact opening menu through noodles, rice dishes, griddled breads, dumplings, soups and sweets. The move marks a genuine evolution: a project that introduced itself by physically reproducing the streets of Taipei now depends more heavily on the cooking itself to carry those streets into Milan.
Lu rou fan builds its depth slowly through pork belly braised with soy and spices, served over white rice with a braised egg. Tainan rou zong changes both technique and texture. Glutinous rice encloses pork belly, duck yolk, dried shrimp, mushrooms, chestnut and peanut inside a bamboo wrapping. Gua bao moves the pork into soft bread with pickled vegetables, peanut powder, sugar, scallion and ginger. Taiwanese sausage takes another direction through pork seasoned with soy, sugar, sorghum liquor and spices. Griddled taro cake replaces meat with taro bound by rice and corn flours, then gains further seasoning through sauces and coriander. Wontons arrive boiled beneath a sour-spicy sauce and bean sprouts. Dessert shifts toward dou hua, the soft tofu preparation paired here with red azuki beans, before ba bao fan returns glutinous rice in a sweet eight-treasure form. Mi jiang closes the sequence as a sweet rice-and-peanut drink, extending rice from staple grain into beverage.
How to fold Le vie di Taipei into your trip.
Le vie di Taipei works as the meal stop within an afternoon tracing the northern center through Milan's first purpose-built public garden, the postwar rise of residential skyscrapers and Pirelli's architectural statement for the Italian economic boom.
Begin at Giardini Indro Montanelli, where Habsburg viceroy Ferdinand commissioned Giuseppe Piermarini during the 1780s to convert former monastic property into Milan's first public garden. Piermarini imposed geometric French planning before Giuseppe Balzaretto reshaped the grounds during the nineteenth century through an English landscape scheme of water, irregular planting and Palazzo Dugnani; Giuseppe Alemagna later intervened after the exhibitions of 1871-1881, enlarging the lake and restructuring the ascent toward the Bastioni. Continue to Torre Breda, where Luigi Mattioni's 1954 skyscraper carried Milan decisively upward during the postwar reconstruction. Rising 117 meters across 30 floors, the building combined an eight-story office base with residential floors above and became the tallest building in Italy on completion, breaking the long-standing height convention associated with the Madonnina and demonstrating how dramatically the area around the former railway grounds was changing. Conclude at Pirelli Tower, conceived after Alberto and Piero Pirelli chose the bomb-damaged ground of their former factory for a new headquarters. Gio Ponti entered the project in 1952, Ponti-Fornaroli-Rosselli and Valtolina-Dell'Orto received the executive commission in 1953, and Pier Luigi Nervi and Arturo Danusso solved the reinforced-concrete structure. The completed 127-meter tower opened in 1960 with 31 floors and a tapering plan, converting industrial destruction into one of the defining architectural achievements of Italy's postwar expansion. The progression moves from Piermarini's Enlightenment-era invention of Milan's public garden through Mattioni's vertical residential experiment into Ponti, Nervi and Pirelli's postwar corporate tower, revealing how the streets surrounding Le vie di Taipei accumulated successive ambitions for a more modern Milan.
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