Why you should experience Mu Dimsum in Milan, Italy.
Mu Dimsum is a refined Cantonese restaurant where Centrale's postwar architectural ambition, Suili and Liwei Zhou's immigrant entrepreneurial journey, Hong Kong dim sum craft and successive generations of internationally trained chefs converge around one of Milan's most ambitious interpretations of contemporary Chinese dining.
Set along Via Aminto Caretto near Via Fabio Filzi and just steps from Torre Galfa, the wood-dominated restaurant occupies Centrale's eastern business quarter, where glass towers and twentieth-century office blocks rise behind the grand railway terminus. A broad kitchen remains visible directly from the pavement, placing the brigade's handwork behind glass before diners enter a dining room structured through timber, subdued lighting and a mezzanine. The Chinese character ζ¨, pronounced mΓΉ and meaning wood, supplies the restaurant's name and gives its dominant architectural element a direct connection with Chinese culture. The result is a highly personal restaurant whose polished Milanese setting carries the Zhou family's migration history into a dining project built to expand the city's understanding of Chinese cuisine.
What you should know about Mu Dimsum.
Mu Dimsum is best known for Suili and Liwei Zhou's progression from immigrant teenagers and newsstand operators into restaurateurs determined to move Chinese dining in Italy beyond the formulas they encountered after arriving in the country. Suili followed her parents from China to Milan as a young teenager in 2001, joining a household in which her mother remained at home and her father worked as a pizzaiolo, then met Liwei at 21. Liwei had reached Italy around 1998 or 1999 as a twelve-year-old, joining parents who worked as street vendors in Sassari before the family moved to Milan as he approached adulthood. He left secondary school and spent six unsuccessful months searching with his parents for a bar, hindered by their limited Italian and his own stutter, before the family acquired a newsstand beneath Garibaldi metro station. Suili and Liwei subsequently operated that kiosk together and expanded into additional newsstands between Crescenzago and the Duomo, followed by a bar-tabacchi, a gaming hall and a 700-square-meter all-you-can-eat restaurant in Melegnano. The short-lived all-you-can-eat venture sharpened their conviction that their future lay in a more ambitious form of Asian hospitality, and they entered that next phase. Mu Fish opened in Nova Milanese in October 2016, giving the couple their first vehicle for a higher-end approach and providing the proving ground for dim sum that would lead Liwei to announce plans for a Milan restaurant centered specifically on the form. Mu Dimsum followed in 2018 as Suili's most personal project, conceived to challenge the narrow association of Chinese restaurants in Italy with the repertoire popularized during the 1990s and to present Cantonese culture through cooking, tea and hospitality. Their first kitchen leader, Hong Kong-born Kin Cheung, had begun cooking at sixteen under several masters, attained the title of Maestro at twenty-one and worked in leading Hong Kong restaurants before moving to Milan in 2014; after meeting Suili and Liwei in 2016, he returned to Hong Kong to refine his technique and tested his dim sum at Mu Fish before the Milan opening. Zhang Qinglong brought more than thirty years across China, Hamburg and Milan, including work on elaborate presentations for Chinese state dinners, giving the original brigade another direct connection with professional Chinese cooking. Chang Liu later brought experience at Noma and with Yoji Tokuyoshi, followed by Andrea Rosselli and Alessandro Berlanda during a period when the team spent a full year developing its three-service Peking duck. Executive chef Bryan Hooi Mun Chung now leads the kitchen after growing up in Malaysia and building an international career, extending the succession of Asian and European experience through which the Zhous have continually renewed the restaurant.
Har Gau expose the precision of the dedicated dim sum team through translucent crystal dough rolled into extremely thin discs with a Chinese cleaver, filled with shrimp and pinched into the traditional crescent form. Mezzaluna nel bosco moves into northern Italian territory through black truffle, giving the handmade dumpling format a local ingredient. Xiao long bao place pork and broth inside steamed dough, with the liquid consumed before the wrapper and filling, shifting the sequence from solid dumpling to broth and meat. Char siu bao wrap caramelized pork inside soft bread, bringing sweetness and roasting into the progression before the larger dishes arrive. Peking duck receives three separate services after being presented whole and carved at the table, a preparation developed through a year of trials before its revised version entered the restaurant. Tea occupies an equally deliberate place through a dedicated selection ranging from smoky mountain varieties to more fragrant infusions, with Suili herself closely associated with the ceremonial service. The progression from crystal-skinned dumplings through broth-filled parcels, roasted pork, carved duck and Chinese tea gives the kitchen multiple techniques through which Cantonese tradition enters the dining room.
How to fold Mu Dimsum into your trip.
Mu Dimsum works as the dining anchor for a Centrale route connecting Melchiorre Bega's International Style tower, Gio Ponti and Pier Luigi Nervi's structural experiment for Pirelli and Ulisse Stacchini's immense railway terminus.
Begin at Torre Galfa, designed by Melchiorre Bega in 1956 for the offices of SAROM and BP Italiana during Milan's postwar construction boom. Bega worked with structural engineers Luigi Antonietti, Piero Papini and Antonio Rognoni, with Arturo Danusso advising on the structure, producing a 31-story tower whose reinforced-concrete supports retreat behind a continuous glass-and-aluminum curtain wall and whose name combines Via Galvani with Via Fara. Continue to Torre Pirelli, commissioned after Alberto and Piero Pirelli chose to build their headquarters on territory associated with the company's first Milan factory, damaged during the 1943 bombing. Gio Ponti worked with Giuseppe Valtolina, Antonio Fornaroli, Alberto Rosselli, Pier Luigi Nervi and Arturo Danusso on the 127-meter reinforced-concrete tower, whose tapering plan and 31 stories made it Milan's tallest building when it opened in 1960. Conclude at Milano Centrale, where Ulisse Stacchini won the architectural competition for the new station in 1912 before war and changing ambitions delayed the project until its 1931 inauguration. Mussolini-era revisions enlarged the building into an immense composition of stone, iron train sheds and sculptural decoration, with Alberto Fava responsible for the engineering of the great steel canopies spanning the tracks. The progression moves from Bega's curtain-wall experimentation through Ponti and Nervi's vertically tapered concrete tower into Stacchini and Fava's grand railway architecture, tracing three radically different expressions of twentieth-century Milan around Mu Dimsum.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Experience premium editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
