Why you should experience Locanda alla Scala in Milan, Italy.
Locanda alla Scala is a cultivated Italian restaurant where Brera's theatrical heritage, Milanese dining traditions, Alberto Tasinato's exacting approach to hospitality and Francesco Iob's contemporary classicism converge inside the former home of one of the city center's historic restaurants.
Set along Via dell'Orso near Via Brera and just steps from Teatro alla Scala, the Italian restaurant occupies Brera at the threshold between the opera district and the neighborhood's dense concentration of galleries, historic residences and cultural institutions, placing lunch or dinner inside one of Central Milan's most layered pedestrian environments. The former Il Coriandolo premises retain an old-Milan formality through intimate rooms before the interior opens unexpectedly into a secluded winter garden, creating a progression from the compact street frontage toward greenery and filtered light. Tablecloths, traditional service and the measured movement of dishes finished in the dining room reinforce the sense of a contemporary restaurant deliberately recovering rituals associated with an older generation of Italian hospitality. The result is a restaurant deeply connected to its immediate Milanese setting, using classical service, a concealed courtyard and carefully renewed regional cooking to bridge Brera's established refinement with the expectations of contemporary dining.
What you should know about Locanda alla Scala.
Locanda alla Scala is best known for Alberto Tasinato transforming the former Il Coriandolo into a contemporary Milanese locanda shaped by a career spent inside some of the city's most accomplished dining rooms. Born in 1985, Tasinato trained at the E. Zegna hotel school in Cavaglià before becoming assistant restaurant manager at Il Pellicano Relais & Châteaux in Porto Ercole. Milan subsequently placed him alongside Andrea Berton at Trussardi alla Scala, where the restaurant reached two MICHELIN stars during his tenure. He later became restaurant manager at V Piano and reunited professionally with Berton at Ristorante Berton. Mandarin Oriental Milano brought another decisive chapter when Tasinato joined the opening of Seta, first directing the restaurant and later serving as the hotel's food and beverage manager as Seta earned two MICHELIN stars and its dining-room service received the top Italian distinction from the Guida Ristoranti dell'Espresso. Tasinato left that trajectory to become an entrepreneur at thirty-three, opening L'Alchimia in 2018 with partners and initially carrying maritozzi into neighborhood offices himself to introduce the new restaurant. L'Alchimia subsequently earned a MICHELIN star. The opportunity to take over Il Coriandolo returned Tasinato to the part of Milan where his professional formation had accelerated, and he conceived Locanda alla Scala as a different concept built around Milanese cooking, substantial wine service and preparations completed at the table. Francesco Iob supplied the culinary continuity between Tasinato's two restaurants after spending three years beside chef Giuseppe Postorino at L'Alchimia before taking command of the Locanda kitchen. Their new restaurant received Foodcommunity Awards' Nuova Apertura honor in 2022. Iob subsequently developed recurring work with Fontina DOP, creating a risotto with Fontina DOP Alpeggio, cedar reduction and scallop carpaccio for FontinaMI 2024 before answering the 2025 edition with Risotto Milano-Aosta, combining Fontina DOP Alpeggio, ossobuco royale and saffron sauce. Tasinato and Iob have consequently built Locanda alla Scala through two complementary professional lineages, joining a maître shaped by luxury hotels and MICHELIN-starred dining with a chef who matured inside Tasinato's own L'Alchimia kitchen.
The cooking begins with recognizable Italian forms and develops them through precise changes in richness, acidity and texture, allowing familiar dishes to arrive with enough intervention to feel specific to Iob's kitchen. Vitello tonnato retains its classical pairing of veal and tuna sauce before caper flowers sharpen the finish, and toasted country bread shifts toward greater salinity through whipped butter and Cantabrian anchovies. Risotto alla Milanese then concentrates the regional argument around saffron and veal jus, with the rice carrying both the perfume of the spice and the darker depth of the meat reduction. Riso al salto takes the Milanese reference into a second texture, crisping the rice before gratinated veal marrow deepens its richness. Costoletta di vitello follows through clarified-butter cooking, preserving the breaded exterior as the veal remains substantial beneath it, then ossobuco returns to slow-cooked meat with gremolata and potato purée. The grill extends the sequence toward aged beef through a forty-five-day matured costata and a one-kilogram Fiorentina designed for two diners. Dessert returns service to the room through Gelato alla crema “A Teatro,” linking the restaurant's proximity to Milanese performance culture with a deliberately classical conclusion. Iob's cooking draws its coherence from these changes of technique within recognizable Italian forms, moving through tonnato, risotto, crisped rice, butter-fried veal, braised ossobuco, mature beef and tableside-minded dessert without losing the traditional foundation Tasinato established for the restaurant.
How to fold Locanda alla Scala into your trip.
Locanda alla Scala works as the dining anchor for a Brera itinerary connecting a Risorgimento collector's private museum, a half-century struggle to expand Milan's principal art gallery and two aristocratic brothers' attempt to reconstruct Renaissance domestic culture in nineteenth-century Milan.
Begin at Museo Poldi Pezzoli, created from Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli's transformation of his seventeenth-century family residence into one of Europe's pioneering house museums. Exiled after supporting the 1848 Milanese uprising, Poldi Pezzoli encountered international collecting culture in Switzerland, France and England before beginning his house-museum project in 1849; Giuseppe Balzaretto reshaped the residence, Filippo Peroni created its neo-Gothic Armoury and Giuseppe Bertini became a central artistic collaborator before the museum opened publicly in 1881. Continue to Palazzo Citterio, the eighteenth-century palace acquired by the Italian state in 1972 through Franco Russoli's ambition to expand Brera into modern and contemporary art. James Stirling developed exhibition spaces during the 1980s, yet the project remained unfinished for decades before Mario Cucinella directed the intervention that preceded the palace's public opening in December 2024, finally giving the Jesi and Vitali collections a permanent setting within the Grande Brera project. Conclude at Museo Bagatti Valsecchi, where brothers Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi devoted the 1880s to reconstructing their family home around fifteenth- and sixteenth-century art and Lombard Renaissance domestic forms. Both trained in law but committed their resources to the house, collecting works by artists including Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, Giampietrino and Zenale as modern heating, running water and electric lighting operated behind the historicist rooms; Giuseppe's son Pasino later preserved the collection through the foundation that preceded the museum's 1994 public opening. The progression moves from Poldi Pezzoli converting personal collecting into a public nineteenth-century institution through Russoli, Stirling and Cucinella extending Brera across half a century into the Bagatti Valsecchi brothers constructing an entire domestic world around Renaissance art, tracing three radically different ways Milan transformed private cultural ambition into enduring public collections.
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