Why you should experience Nishiki in Milan, Italy.
Nishiki is an established Japanese restaurant where Porta Romana's evolving southern corridor, Xiaobo Zhou and Alessandra Hu's long stewardship, chef Peng Yong's two decades in Milanese Japanese fine dining and Naòs Design's extensive architectural intervention converge through sushi, Mediterranean ingredients and one of the city's more developed private-dining programs.
Set along Corso Lodi near Via Scrivia and just steps from Scalo di Porta Romana, the 140-seat restaurant occupies a substantial address on the southern approach to Central Milan, where established residential blocks meet the former railway territory now undergoing one of the city's largest urban transformations. A central sushi counter faces the dining room through smoked reflective glass, with petrol-blue upholstery, champagne-toned metalwork, brass-edged tables and a suspended ceiling installation establishing the visual language created during the restaurant's major 2017 redesign. Six private rooms deepen the Japanese spatial reference through slatted screens and fabric curtains, giving smaller parties enclosed environments around the larger central room and open kitchen. The result is a mature Milanese Japanese restaurant whose twenty-year history now connects Zhou and Hu's stewardship, Peng Yong's cooking, an ambitious wine program and a design commission conceived specifically around the meeting of Japanese and Western visual culture.
What you should know about Nishiki.
Nishiki is best known for Xiaobo Zhou and Alessandra Hu developing one of Milan's longer-running Japanese restaurants through sustained investment in cooking, private dining and architectural design. The restaurant began operating on Corso Lodi in 2005, with Zhou and Hu directing the project together for more than thirteen years. Zhou's professional relationship with sushi extended beyond Nishiki when his friendship with sushi master Sixia Li generated Cinquantadue near Foro Bonaparte, connecting the Corso Lodi proprietor with another contemporary Japanese restaurant in Central Milan. Chef Peng Yong brought another long trajectory to Nishiki, with Gambero Rosso describing him in 2024 as a practitioner of Japanese fine dining active in Milan for twenty years. A major creative turning point arrived in 2017 when Zhou commissioned Milanese architecture practice Naòs Design to completely reconsider the restaurant's interiors. Architects Andrea Alessi and designer Dario Alessi developed the project around an encounter between Japanese and Western design, using a petrol-green tone inspired by lake water across the main room and placing champagne-colored metalwork above it. The ceiling became the commission's most conspicuous installation, with metallic mesh shaped into an illuminated suspended composition whose changing surface recalls light moving across water. Naòs gave the sushi counter a monolithic oak-and-concrete front with brass finishing, then used smoked reflective glass to partially expose the kitchen behind it. Demart contributed another layer through digital fresco decoration across walls, furniture, the terrace and individual private rooms, giving separate visual treatments to the enclosed dining spaces. Recognition eventually followed the restaurant's longevity and continued development: Gambero Rosso's 2025 assessment placed Nishiki among Milan's enduring Japanese establishments, and its guide system awarded the restaurant two Bacchette for sushi alongside one Mappamondo for international cooking. Across two decades, Zhou and Hu have consequently carried Nishiki through culinary changes, a major architectural reinvention and a broader expansion of Zhou's activity within Milanese Japanese dining.
Peng Yong's cooking begins with precise raw preparations before widening into combinations that connect Japanese technique with ingredients drawn from Italy and the Mediterranean. Niwa Roll layers spicy tuna and avocado with toro, kizami wasabi, sturgeon caviar and gold leaf, concentrating richness, heat and salinity within a single uramaki. Toro New Style wraps scallops with fatty tuna carpaccio before adding Mazara del Vallo red prawns, ikura, katsuobushi and truffle, bringing Japanese seafood forms into direct contact with prized Italian ingredients. Tempura introduces another register through prawns and zucchini flowers filled with prawn tartare, and almond-coated prawn croquettes add a second fried texture. Miyabi Beef wagyu appears inside dumplings with black truffle, carrying the kitchen's fusion approach from seafood into meat. Steamed or seared turbot and sea bass allow the daily fish selection to move through restrained hot preparations with composed dressings. A wine cellar extending beyond 400 labels supports those courses alongside sake and cocktails, with the presence of specialist wine service giving the beverage program unusual depth for a sushi restaurant. The progression from sashimi and elaborate rolls through tempura, wagyu and cooked fish shows how Nishiki has developed its repertoire around Japanese technique without confining Peng Yong to a single regional canon.
How to fold Nishiki into your trip.
Nishiki works as the meal stop for an afternoon tracing southern Milan through early twentieth-century public recreation, a theater complex recovered through decades of cultural intervention and the former industrial plant that Rem Koolhaas transformed into a major contemporary art institution.
Begin at Bagni Misteriosi, where engineer Lorenzo Secchi added outdoor pools in 1937 to a 1930s civic complex already conceived for fencing, boxing, medical services, a library and neighborhood organizations. Closure followed in 2007 before Fondazione Pier Lombardo and Teatro Franco Parenti drove a major recovery under Andrée Ruth Shammah, with Michele De Lucchi contributing to the wider architectural renewal and the 9,600-square-meter swimming complex reopening in 2016 under a name drawn from Giorgio de Chirico's Bagni misteriosi. Continue to Teatro Franco Parenti, founded in 1972 by Andrée Ruth Shammah, Franco Parenti, Giovanni Testori, Dante Isella and others as the Salone Pier Lombardo before assuming Parenti's name after his death. Fondazione Pier Lombardo began recovering the surrounding 15,000-square-meter complex in 1996, and the theater reopened in 2008 after Michele De Lucchi's renovation joined eight performance spaces across three levels with interventions by scenographer Gian Maurizio Fercioni. Conclude at Fondazione Prada, where OMA under Rem Koolhaas converted a 1910s distillery into a 19,000-square-meter cultural campus combining preserved warehouses, laboratories and silos with new architecture. The Milan headquarters opened in 2015 with the Podium and Cinema among its principal additions, and the 60-meter Torre completed the complex in 2018 through nine exhibition levels whose changing dimensions and orientations create distinct conditions for contemporary art. The progression moves from Secchi's municipal sports architecture through Shammah and De Lucchi's recovery of a multidisciplinary theater complex into Koolhaas and OMA's transformation of industrial fabric for contemporary art, revealing a southern Milan repeatedly remade through ambitious cultural reuse.
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