Nu Pure Asian Cuisine, Milan

Why you should experience Nu Pure Asian Cuisine in Milan, Italy.

Nu Pure Asian Cuisine is a captivating Asian restaurant where Feltre's eastern edge, the Gao family's long investment in Japanese dining, Italian design and the preserved shell of a nineteenth-century cascina converge through Japanese cooking downstairs and a broader Asian fusion program above.

Set along Via Feltre near Via Crescenzago and just steps from Parco Lambro, the restaurant occupies a former rural building in territory where Milan's postwar expansion meets one of the city's largest surviving green spaces. An open-air entrance crosses wooden walkways and water gardens beneath a pagoda before the old cascina divides into two distinct dining environments, pairing exposed brick and tatami downstairs with the soaring proportions of the fusion room above. The building itself becomes part of the encounter as its Lombard agricultural shell meets Japanese spatial references, glass, subdued illumination and suspended contemporary design, creating a deliberate transition from the surrounding city before food reaches the table. The result is a Feltre restaurant whose longevity comes from a Gao family project that treated Asian cooking and Italian design as interconnected disciplines years before the same philosophy expanded into the family's nearby hotel.

What you should know about Nu Pure Asian Cuisine.

Nu Pure Asian Cuisine is best known for Massimo Gao and his family establishing one of Milan's early ambitious encounters between Japanese restaurant culture and Italian design, then developing that experiment into a wider NU project encompassing hospitality and commissioned creative work. Gao was already identified in 2004 as one of the restaurateurs who had helped introduce Milan to East Asian flavors, with NU operating from the nineteenth-century cascina on Via Feltre and preparing house creations including the Nu Maki alongside sashimi. The family transformed the old rural building into two complementary restaurants, separating a rigorously Japanese ground-floor program from an upstairs operation drawing from Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and other Asian traditions. That division gave NU an unusual physical structure: diners entered through an outdoor composition of wooden walkways, water gardens and a pagoda before choosing between two kitchens occupying different levels of the same historic shell. By 2012, the Gao family's restaurant work was being credited as a precursor to the pairing of Italian design with Japanese dining that subsequently shaped NU Hotel, the family's art hotel developed nearby with architects Nisi Magnoni and Sabrina Gallini. Massimo Gao described the hotel as an attempt to carry the NU name into another market with the values his family had established through its earlier businesses, turning the restaurant into the conceptual predecessor of a larger hospitality venture. Creative collaboration continued inside Via Feltre itself in 2016, when Gao commissioned Sabrina Gallini and Simone Marchiorato of SGSM Studio to design new lighting for the fusion room. Gallini and Marchiorato responded to its vast wooden ceiling, whose form recalled the inverted hull of a ship, by suspending iron and mirrored-glass lamps conceived as water lilies across the void and climbing the tall walls. The commission joined the nineteenth-century cascina, Japanese garden references and contemporary Italian design through an intervention visible through the restaurant's large windows from the street. More than two decades of operation have left NU with a significance extending beyond its cooking: the restaurant became the Gao family's proving ground for a design-conscious hospitality philosophy that later moved from Via Feltre into architecture, hotel development and further creative commissions.

Japanese cooking establishes the ground-floor route through sashimi, nigiri, maki, tempura and composed raw-fish preparations, preserving the side of NU that first introduced many Milanese diners to Gao's approach. Nu Maki carries the restaurant's name into a house roll, and sashimi moriawase presents several cuts without the additional construction of rice and nori. The upstairs kitchen broadens the geography through Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese influences, allowing sauces, spice, coconut milk, rice and cooked seafood to shift the meal beyond the precision of the Japanese section downstairs. Fish remains a connection between the two approaches as raw preparations give way to dishes shaped through wok cooking, marinades and warmer sauces. Thai combinations bring sweetness, acidity and chile into the sequence, and Vietnamese references introduce lighter preparations beside the stronger seasoning of the Chinese and fusion selections. Presentation has remained unusually deliberate across both kitchens, with wooden boats, teak boards and earthenware serving pieces carrying food into the visual composition established by the cascina and garden. Moving between the two programs reveals the premise behind the name Pure Asian Cuisine: not a single national repertoire, but distinct Japanese and pan-Asian approaches given separate physical territories inside the same building.

How to fold Nu Pure Asian Cuisine into your trip.

Nu Pure Asian Cuisine works as the meal stop for an afternoon tracing Milan's eastern boundary through a celebrated postwar housing experiment, Enrico Casiraghi's reconstruction of Lombard countryside and an agricultural property whose history eventually connected Federico Borromeo with the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana.

Begin at Feltre, planned between 1957 and 1963 under the coordination of Gino Pollini on land then considered an extreme eastern periphery beyond the railway and north of industrial Lambrate. Five ten-story blocks bend around a large permeable green enclosure, with lower four-story courtyard buildings creating a second scale and connecting the new settlement more closely with established Milanese building patterns. Continue to Parco Lambro, created in 1936 by Enrico Casiraghi as an interpretation of Lombardy's traditional countryside structured around the Lambro River, irrigation channels, spontaneous vegetation, three artificial hills, two former lakes and four kilometers of paths. Wartime demand for firewood devastated much of Casiraghi's planting before Romano Beretta and Milan's technical office directed major reconstruction during the 1950s and 1960s, expanding a landscape now covering 773,000 square meters. Conclude at Cascina Biblioteca, whose territory belonged to the medieval Grangia di San Gregorio and was cultivated by the Umiliati before passing through Ospedale Maggiore ownership. Federico Borromeo acquired the property during the early seventeenth century as a country retreat, wrote about life there in De Villa Gregoriana and left the estate to the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana with instructions that its agricultural income fund daily masses in his memory and annual dowries for eighteen poor young women; the Ambrosiana retained it for more than three centuries. The progression moves from Pollini's postwar Feltre through Casiraghi's constructed vision of the Lombard countryside into Borromeo's Villa Gregoriana and its centuries-long Ambrosiana connection, revealing the unusually layered eastern territory surrounding Nu Pure Asian Cuisine.

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