Ramen Shifu Filzi, Milan

Why you should experience Ramen Shifu Filzi in Milan, Italy.

Ramen Shifu Filzi is a foundational ramen restaurant where Centrale's postwar metropolitan character, Japanese regional noodle traditions, street-food culture and Jay Lin and Emanuele Fragella's Italian expansion of a Madrid-born restaurant business converge along Via Fabio Filzi.

Set along Via Fabio Filzi near Via Galvani and just steps from Piazza Duca d'Aosta, the restaurant occupies the corridor between Milano Centrale and the towers extending toward Porta Nuova, where postwar offices, hotels, residential blocks and newer high-rise architecture place several generations of Milanese development within a short walk. Japanese street graphics, illuminated signs, manga imagery and lanterns turn the interior toward the urban imagery that became central to Ramen Shifu's Milan restaurants. Tonkotsu, shoyu and miso ramen establish three principal regional references before curry, fried chicken, tempura, chili, vegan preparations and brothless noodles extend the menu. The result is a Centrale restaurant where Lin and Fragella established Ramen Shifu's Milan operation during the upheaval of 2020 and created the base from which the business expanded across the city and Italy.

What you should know about Ramen Shifu Filzi.

Ramen Shifu Filzi is best known for becoming Jay Lin and Emanuele Fragella's first Milan restaurant for Ramen Shifu in 2020, joining two sharply different professional paths at the beginning of an Italian expansion that later reached multiple cities. The larger concept originated with Guo Jianyong, president of Asian restaurant group Ayala Japón, who opened the first Ramen Shifu on Madrid's Calle Ayala in January 2017 after repeated visits to ramen restaurants in Japan and direct study of Hakata-style preparation. Two more Madrid restaurants followed before the end of 2017, Alicante arrived in July 2018 and Naples became the first operation outside Spain in August 2019, placing the business in Italy before its Milan chapter began. Lin entered that chapter with previous restaurant experience as a partner in Fusho and Wok'in, projects developed around sushi burritos and wok-cooked noodles, and had learned ramen production from a Japanese practitioner in 2017 while studying flour selection and methods for producing the dish consistently across restaurant kitchens. Fragella reached the project through a different route, leaving an established pharmaceutical career to devote himself to Asian cooking and taking an active position behind the stove as the Milan restaurant opened. Lin secured Italian exclusivity for Ramen Shifu in 2020, and the pair opened Via Fabio Filzi that autumn as the brand's second Italian restaurant during a period when pandemic restrictions made delivery and takeaway central to its earliest months. Filzi subsequently became the starting point for a Milan sequence that reached Viale Monte Nero, Corso Manusardi and Via Pacini, with Fragella managing the Milan restaurants as the operation expanded. Lin spent the following years building centralized purchasing, marketing and staff instruction around the Italian business, requiring new personnel to complete two weeks of preparation in Milan or Rome and distributing predetermined ingredient portions through the wider organization while individual kitchens retained responsibility for fresh broth. By February 2025 Lin had opened seven Italian Ramen Shifu restaurants in four years and was pursuing twenty-two by the end of that year and thirty-five within two years. Filzi entered another chapter in 2026 through a complete redesign of the original Milan restaurant, turning the first address into a Japanese-street interior of illuminated signs and lightboxes after five years during which the operation it launched had grown across Milan and the national market.

Tonkotsu ramen anchors the menu in the Hakata tradition that Guo Jianyong studied in Japan, combining a dense pork-bone broth with noodles, marinated chashu, pak choi, nori, bamboo, naruto, soft-cooked egg, scallion and bean sprouts. Shoyu ramen moves toward the soy-seasoned form associated with Tokyo, then miso ramen introduces the fermented soybean base strongly associated with Sapporo. Chashu curry ramen changes the house broth through curry before pork, vegetables and egg deepen the bowl, and yuzu ramen introduces citrus against the creamy stock. Ebi tempura ramen places fried prawns against shoyu-seasoned broth, preserving a crisp element beside the noodles before fried chicken ramen applies the same contrast through poultry. Tan tan ramen combines miso, peanut sauce and chili with seasoned meat, then Inferno ramen intensifies the heat through the restaurant's dedicated spicy sauce. Miso pinnatsu shifts into the vegan repertoire through miso, peanut sauce, plant protein, mushrooms and vegetables, with Dragon ramen carrying the hotter seasoning into another meat-free bowl. Mazesoba removes broth and coats the noodles directly with seasonings and toppings, giving the menu a final structural change after the progression through pork stock, soy, miso, curry, citrus, frying and chili.

How to fold Ramen Shifu Filzi into your trip.

Ramen Shifu Filzi works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing Centrale and Porta Nuova through postwar corporate ambition, the conversion of former railway land and a new institution devoted to Milan's twentieth-century historical memory.

Begin at Pirelli Tower, conceived after Alberto and Piero Pirelli chose to move company management onto the site of former production works near Milano Centrale and commissioned a team led by Gio Ponti for a headquarters radically different from the conventional office block. Ponti worked with Antonio Fornaroli, Alberto Rosselli, Giuseppe Valtolina, Egidio Dell'Orto, Arturo Danusso and Pier Luigi Nervi on the 127-meter reinforced-concrete tower, whose first stone was laid in July 1956 and whose completion in 1960 gave Pirelli a 31-story headquarters that stood as Europe's tallest reinforced-concrete building and later passed to Regione Lombardia in 1978. Continue to Biblioteca degli Alberi, whose development began when Inside Outside and Petra Blaisse won an international competition for a new Porta Nuova public park in 2004, initiating a project that would take fourteen years to reach completion. Agnes Denes temporarily transformed five hectares of the future park into Wheatfield during Expo 2015, then the completed Biblioteca degli Alberi opened in October 2018 with more than one hundred plant species, hundreds of trees organized into circular groupings and a landscape conceived as the concluding green component of Porta Nuova's redevelopment. Conclude at Casa della Memoria, commissioned for organizations preserving the history of the Resistance, Nazi deportation, terrorism and political violence during the second half of the twentieth century and awarded through a 2011 competition won by Milan architecture studio Baukuh. Construction proceeded from 2013 to 2015 before the building opened on April 24, 2015, one day before the seventieth anniversary of Italy's Liberation, bringing associations including ANPI, ANED and organizations representing victims of terrorism into a permanent cultural institution on the edge of Porta Nuova. The progression moves from Pirelli's postwar corporate ambition and Ponti and Nervi's vertical engineering through Petra Blaisse's fourteen-year conversion of former railway land into Biblioteca degli Alberi into Baukuh's creation of Casa della Memoria as a permanent home for institutions preserving Milan's experience of resistance, deportation and political violence.

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