Why you should experience Nabi in Milan, Italy.
Nabi is a pioneering vegetarian bistrot where Porta Romana's independent dining culture, eastern Milan's appetite for small-scale experimentation, Giordano Salvatori's early commitment to organic food and a plant-based burger concept introduced ahead of the city's broader vegan boom converge at a Via Cadore address active since 2012.
Set along Via Cadore near Via Spartaco and just steps from Parco Vittorio Formentano, the bright bistrot occupies Porta Romana's eastern reach, where compact neighborhood streets meet the gardens formed on the former Verziere market grounds around Largo Marinai d'Italia. Broad windows open the modest dining room toward the street, and light timber, pale surfaces and abundant plants continue into a leafy outdoor section that softens the transition between tables and Via Cadore. Breakfast and brunch give the room a daytime rhythm centered on coffee, cakes and shared tables, with the informal proportions keeping service close to the surrounding neighborhood. The result is a relaxed Porta Romana address whose daylight, greenery and small-room intimacy provide an understated setting for one of Milan's earlier experiments in making vegetarian food part of casual daily dining.
What you should know about Nabi.
Nabi is best known for Giordano Salvatori turning the collapse of an earlier catering venture into an organic bistrot that opened in August 2012 before introducing Milan's first entirely vegan hamburger restaurant in February 2014. Salvatori studied Human Resources Organization and worked through university as a barista, waiter and catering employee before establishing a catering agency with two partners in 2006. That company closed in 2011, sending him through a year of searching before he found Via Cadore 41, then occupied by a model-making shop. The new name compressed “Natura Biologica” into NaBi, placing organic sourcing at the center of a project Salvatori developed from his own longstanding interest in nutrition. A decisive expansion arrived on February 12, 2014, when the existing BioCaffè added an evening hamburger operation devoted entirely to vegan recipes, a format presented at the time as the first of its kind in Milan. Seven burgers launched the concept, replacing meat, eggs and dairy with combinations built from tofu, chickpeas, lentils, seitan, vegetables and grains. Chef Matteo Sanfilippo became one of the culinary figures associated with that phase, developing plant-based combinations through legumes, seeds, nuts and vegetables and presenting Nabi's burger work nationally in 2015. Salvatori extended the project outside Via Cadore through Edù The Vegan Therapy, a five-day home-delivery program developed with nutritionist and homeopath Marco Spadaro and prepared through the SoloVeg laboratory. The original bistrot later entered a new phase under the Nabi by Bgood name, shifting its emphasis toward brunch, specialty coffee and contemporary healthy cooking without erasing the vegetarian foundation established more than a decade earlier.
Current brunch service moves through open toast, bowls, cakes and vegetable-led sides, allowing sweet and savory dishes to share the table without reproducing the earlier evening burger structure. Avocado toast combines toasted bread with avocado, seeds and fresh garnishes, and hummus supplies a creamy pulse-based counterpoint among the smaller portions. Bowls assemble grains, vegetables, fruit and proteins through combinations designed around contrasting temperatures and textures, with vegetarian choices joined by a limited number of omnivorous alternatives. Cakes carry much of the vegan and gluten-free range, with blueberry cheesecake among the recurring contemporary selections. Croissants and other breakfast pastries move the opening hours toward a more conventional Milanese morning ritual before larger brunch plates take over later in the day. Fresh juices preserve another longstanding strand of the Via Cadore repertoire through fruit and vegetable combinations prepared for breakfast and lunch. Coffee now occupies a stronger position beside those dishes, completing Nabi's evolution into an all-day daytime format built around brunch, vegetarian cooking and café service.
How to fold Nabi into your trip.
Nabi works as the meal stop for a Porta Romana route connecting a Baroque burial complex created for Milan's great hospital, Liberty architecture born from the city's wholesale food trade and the theatrical occupation through which Dario Fo and Franca Rame turned a surviving market pavilion into a stage for political performance.
Begin at Rotonda della Besana, where Ospedale Maggiore acquired land beyond its older burial ground in 1694 and began constructing the Foppone in 1695 under Arrisio Arrigoni. San Michele ai Nuovi Sepolcri followed as the complex expanded, and Francesco Croce developed the great arcaded enclosure from 1719, with silk merchant Giambattista Annone helping finance its completion in 1731 after groundwater and insufficient burial capacity forced the cemetery to grow. Continue to Parco Vittorio Formentano, whose grounds preserve the former territory of Milan's Verziere wholesale produce market after the trading complex moved from Porta Vittoria into a vast new site in the early twentieth century. The market disappeared in 1965, leaving the territory to become a public garden and preserving a single architectural survivor from the commercial complex at its center. Conclude at Palazzina Liberty Dario Fo e Franca Rame, designed by Alberto Migliorini in 1908 as the Verziere's café, restaurant and meeting place for produce merchants. Dario Fo and Franca Rame occupied the abandoned pavilion with La Comune in 1974, converting it into a theatrical laboratory and performance venue during a decisive period in Fo's political theater before Milan dedicated the building to the couple in 2017. The progression moves from the Ospedale Maggiore's Baroque response to burial through the rise and disappearance of the Verziere wholesale market into Fo and Rame's conversion of its surviving pavilion for experimental theater, revealing three centuries of institutional change around Nabi.
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