Why you should experience Li-Sei Deli in Milan, Italy.
Li-Sei Deli is a deeply personal Korean deli where Navigli's canal-side culture, founder Okhee Lee's Korean family history in Kyoto, her mother's cafe tradition and Kihyuk Jung's design background converge inside a tiny Via Vigevano dining room.
Set along Via Vigevano between the Darsena and Porta Genova, the deli occupies the nineteenth-century street axis that developed alongside the railway and the working-class housing surrounding the station. Antique wooden furniture and restrained interiors carry Okhee's collecting passion into the room, with Kihyuk's design contribution giving the compact space a visual character connected to his studies at Milan's Accademia di Brera. Korean home cooking then absorbs the Japanese influences of Okhee's upbringing in Kyoto, turning a meal into an encounter with a family history lived across Korea, Japan and Italy. The result is a Navigli deli where two founders transformed migration, inherited cafe culture, art-school training and family cooking into one of Milan's most personal interpretations of Korean food.
What you should know about Li-Sei Deli.
Li-Sei Deli is best known for Okhee Lee and Kihyuk Jung translating an unusually layered family journey into a Korean restaurant whose roots reach back to Kyoto. Okhee is Korean, born and raised in Japan as the third generation of her family to live there; her parents were second-generation Koreans in Japan. Her strongest hospitality influence came from her mother, an antiquarian enthusiast who created two Korean cafes in Kyoto and used them to bring Korean cooking and culture into her adopted Japanese surroundings. One of those cafes was called ζι, Li-sei, the name Okhee later carried to Milan. Her mother had established the Kyoto cafe more than twenty-five years before a 2025 interview with Okhee, and bibimbap became its signature dish. The connection ran deeper than borrowing a name. Okhee absorbed her mother's affection for small cafes, antiques and simple cooking, then began cooking for friends after moving to Italy as a young woman. Milan also brought her together with Kihyuk, a fellow Korean whose upbringing had followed a different cultural path. Kihyuk studied scenography at the Accademia di Brera and later applied that training to Li-Sei's interior, giving the couple complementary roles across cooking, design and operation. Their long-held ambition was to create a place that brought their Korean culture closer to the country that had received them in youth. The plan met an extraordinary first test in spring 2020: Li-Sei began trading during Milan's COVID-19 shutdown, with Okhee and Kihyuk cooking and managing the fledgling project through takeaway and delivery. That difficult beginning eventually led to broader recognition. Eater later selected Li-Sei among its best restaurants in Milan, Gambero Rosso included Okhee and Kihyuk among the city's leading Korean addresses and its 2025 international-restaurant evaluation awarded Li-Sei the Premio Foglia. Okhee also appeared at Studio in Triennale alongside Aiyu Wakayanagi of House of Ronin and Vasiliki Pierrakea of Vasiliki Kouzina for a discussion devoted to international restaurants that had become neighborhood institutions. Six years after that precarious beginning, the deli remains connected to its Kyoto predecessor closely enough that the original Li-sei cafe now presents the Milan restaurant on its own Japanese website.
Bibimbap carries the family connection directly onto the table. Mixed rice supports fresh vegetables, egg and marinated beef, with gochujang served separately; vegetarian and vegan versions preserve the basic arrangement. Korean fried chicken changes the rhythm completely. Its crisp coating comes with choices such as sweet-spicy yangnyum, soy-based kanjang or padak with scallion sauce. Japchae follows with sweet-potato noodles, vegetables and beef. Yubu kimbap introduces fried tofu and vegetables, finished with house-made ssamjang mayonnaise and Cervia sea salt. The bulgogi burger makes a sharper geographical turn. Marinated beef, cheese and ssamjang mayonnaise arrive inside a bun from Milan bakery Le Polveri. Dessert returns toward Okhee's Korean and Japanese inheritance through mugwort, black-sesame and matcha tteok filled with sweet red bean. Drinks continue the same movement. Kyoto-style filtered coffee sits beside Korean omija, green-plum, yuja and lotus-root teas, then fermented green-tea kombucha and Korean soju extend the selection in different directions. A sixth-anniversary collaboration with Domaine d'AchillΓ©e produced a Li-Sei edition of PΓ©pin orange wine from Alsatian GewΓΌrztraminer, adding a contemporary European partnership to a deli born from Korean family cooking in Japan.
How to fold Li-Sei Deli into your trip.
Li-Sei Deli works as the meal at the center of a compact Via Vigevano route connecting Arnaldo Pomodoro's sculptural career, Milan's canal labor history and the industrial conversion that produced Mudec.
Begin at Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, only a few doors from Li-Sei at Via Vigevano 3. Pomodoro created his foundation in 1995 to preserve his work and support experimentation around contemporary art; its first exhibition home occupied an old bolt factory in Rozzano from 1999 to 2004, followed by a workshop in the former Riva & Calzoni steelworks from 2005 to 2011. The foundation moved into Pomodoro's Via Vigevano studio in 2013, and its Open Studio exhibitions now revisit distinct periods of his career inside the sculptor's own working environment. Continue to Vicolo dei Lavandai, where the surviving washhouse preserves the labor culture that once depended on the Navigli. Carla Casiraghi and her family protected the historic canopy through decades of conservation work, an achievement for which Milan awarded her civic recognition in 2019; the surviving site recalls the washerwomen and other workers whose livelihoods developed directly along the water. Cross toward Mudec to finish inside a different chapter of the district's working history. The museum occupies part of the former Ansaldo industrial complex, with David Chipperfield responsible for its architectural conversion and a covered glass agora organizing movement through the building. Mudec opened on March 27, 2015 as Milan prepared for Expo, bringing the city's civic collections from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania together inside the new museum. The progression moves from Pomodoro's conversion of a personal studio into an artistic institution through the preserved canal labor of Vicolo dei Lavandai and Chipperfield's reinvention of former industrial ground at Mudec, framing Li-Sei Deli within a district repeatedly shaped by migration, craft and cultural exchange.
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