Why you should experience Mao Hunan in Milan, Italy.
Mao Hunan is a fiercely regional Chinese restaurant where Città Studi's international character, Angela Haizhen Lei and Jieni Hu's memories of Hunan, Marco Iannone's own connection with the province and a deliberately uncompromising approach to Chinese cooking converge inside the original restaurant of one of Milan's most consequential contemporary Chinese hospitality groups.
Set along Via Nicola Antonio Porpora near Via Andrea Maria Ampère and just steps from Piazza Aspromonte, the Chinese restaurant occupies the northeastern edge of Città Studi, where residential blocks, university life and the commercial streets approaching Loreto place it beyond Milan's established Chinese district around Via Paolo Sarpi. A surviving Gelateria e Latteria sign remains above the entrance, preserved when the founders uncovered the handmade inscription beneath the Tex-Mex signage left by the previous occupant, giving the understated exterior an accidental piece of Milanese history. Inside, Mao Zedong imagery and red graphic elements establish the Hunan connection before bowls and shared plates crowd the tables, creating a dining rhythm closer to a regional Chinese osteria than a conventional European sequence of individually ordered courses. The result is a restaurant whose modest Via Porpora setting intensifies the surprise of encountering one of Milan's earliest and most influential attempts to present a specific Chinese regional cuisine on its own terms.
What you should know about Mao Hunan.
Mao Hunan is best known for Angela Haizhen Lei, Jieni Hu and Marco Iannone turning Jieni's longing for the food of Changsha into a Milan restaurant devoted to the cooking of Hunan. Lei was born in China, arrived in Italy at eight, studied in Florence and later moved to Milan, where she and Hu met at Università Bocconi. Hu had come directly from Hunan to study at Bocconi and found the Chinese restaurants around her heavily adapted to Italian expectations, leaving the dishes of her childhood largely absent. Iannone arrived through a different route. A southern Italian management engineer working in Hunan, he met Hu during one of her return trips to China, connecting his professional period in the province with the friendship between Hu and Lei in Milan. The three left careers far removed from restaurants, including Iannone's engineering and Hu's work at Class TV, and created Mao Hunan in 2015 as the kind of small traditional osteria they knew from Hunan. The name and Mao Zedong imagery linked the project directly with the province where Mao was born, yet the founders' deeper concept concerned regional specificity at a time when Milanese Chinese dining was still dominated by a narrower group of familiar dishes. Their first audience included Chinese students missing food from home, followed by an unexpectedly strong Italian clientele. That response transformed one restaurant into a sequence of distinct projects. Maoji Street Food followed around nearby Piazza Aspromonte, recreating a Changsha street from the 1970s or 1980s; Mini Maoji subsequently took Chinese-filled mantou to the Navigli, and Mao Hot Pot explored communal broth cooking as another separate strand of Chinese food culture. Lei emerged as the group's most visible culinary figure, later teaching regional Chinese cooking through Acadèmia.tv and appearing among Cook's twenty women of the year in 2022. Gambero Rosso subsequently awarded Mao Hunan two Mappamondi, its distinction for international restaurants in Italy. A project begun by three friends outside professional restaurant careers had, within several years, produced multiple Milanese formats and placed Lei among the prominent advocates for regional Chinese cooking in Italy.
Pancetta saltata with fresh green chilies, garlic and soy reaches the table from the wok with the fat rendered around thin slices of pork, establishing the direct relationship between meat and fresh chili that runs through much of the cooking. Pancetta brasata changes that texture completely, taking pork belly into a slow braise until the cubes soften beneath a dark caramelized glaze. Pesto di melanzane introduces another register through eggplant worked with century egg, chili and aromatics, with the final crushing performed at the table in a mortar so soft flesh, preserved egg and seasoning merge immediately before eating. Heat becomes sharper in pollo fritto piccante, where crisp chicken pieces sit among dried chilies and Sichuan pepper, leaving the exterior dry and crunchy against the aromatic burn of the seasoning. Riso saltato di Changsha gives the meal a darker, quieter foundation through soy, egg and vegetables, and ravioli di maiale in salsa Sichuan bring soft dough against chili-rich sauce. Shuizu di manzo pushes the sequence toward its hottest point through thin beef submerged in a red broth charged with dried chilies and Sichuan pepper. Cold preparations then reset the palate through cucumber, coriander, peanuts and acidic sauces before another wok dish returns the table to smoke, fat and chili. Mao Hunan builds the meal through these deliberate changes between braising, frying, pounding, cold dressing, broth and high-heat wok cooking, making texture and degrees of heat as consequential as the individual ingredients.
How to fold Mao Hunan into your trip.
Mao Hunan works as the dining anchor for a Città Studi itinerary connecting Gio Ponti's experiments in sacred architecture, Piero Portaluppi's interwar residential work and Antonio Boschi and Marieda Di Stefano's extraordinary commitment to twentieth-century Italian art.
Begin at Chiesa di San Luca Evangelista, commissioned from Gio Ponti and developed with Antonio Fornaroli and Alberto Rosselli between 1955 and 1961 after the new parish had initially occupied a tiny chapel inside a Via Jommelli apartment. Construction began in 1959, and the project became Ponti's first Milanese church, preceding ideas he developed further at San Francesco al Fopponino, Santa Maria Annunciata at Ospedale San Carlo and the concattedrale in Taranto. Continue to Casa Corbellini-Wassermann, where Piero Portaluppi directed a 1934 to 1936 residential project whose pink and gray Ornavasso marble, angular openings and massive helical staircase gave an middle-class apartment building unusual architectural ambition. Portaluppi reused that staircase after its earlier appearance in the temporary Casa del Sabato per gli sposi, created with BBPR for the 1933 Triennale di Milano. Conclude at Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano, housed in another Portaluppi building completed between 1929 and 1931 and centered on the collection assembled by Antonio Boschi and Marieda Di Stefano. The couple acquired more than 2,000 works, initially through galleries including Milano, Il Milione and Della Spiga and later through direct relationships with contemporary artists; 300 pieces now occupy their former apartment, spanning Mario Sironi, Giorgio Morandi, Filippo De Pisis, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and the Corrente, Spazialismo and Informale movements. The progression moves from Ponti's early experiments with modern Catholic architecture through Portaluppi's interwar reinvention of Milanese domestic design into Boschi and Di Stefano's transformation of private collecting into an enduring account of twentieth-century Italian art.
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