Why you should experience Ravioleria Sarpi in Milan, Italy.
Ravioleria Sarpi is a pioneering Chinese street-food shop where Chinatown's pedestrian commerce, Chinese migration history, open-kitchen food culture and Milanese appetite for specialized regional cooking converge along Via Paolo Sarpi.
Set along Via Paolo Sarpi near Via Bramante and just steps from the neighborhood's pedestrian crossroads around Via Giovanni Battista Niccolini, the shop occupies the central stretch of Milan's Chinatown, where Chinese groceries, bakeries, restaurants and specialist retailers fill the storefronts of a nineteenth-century commercial street transformed by successive generations of migration and the later pedestrianization of its principal axis. A tiny street-facing kitchen places cooks and customers on opposite sides of the glass, turning the hand preparation of dumplings into the dominant physical feature of the fifteen-square-meter original shop. Food leaves the counter ready for the surrounding pedestrian street, preserving a format conceived around immediate preparation and eating on foot. The result is a compact street-food operation where Chinatown's commercial intensity surrounds one of the businesses that helped establish specialized Chinese food as a major part of contemporary Milanese dining.
What you should know about Ravioleria Sarpi.
Ravioleria Sarpi is best known for Agie Zhou's progression from a Chinese textile family and Bocconi economics graduate into a restaurateur whose fifteen-square-meter dumpling shop became the foundation for a wider group of Chinese culinary businesses in Milan. Zhou's family moved to Italy in 1996 and worked in textiles, and he later completed economics studies at Bocconi followed by an MBA at IE Business School in Madrid before initially attempting to follow the family into clothing. A planned cashmere shop on Via Paolo Sarpi changed direction after Zhou developed a relationship with Walter Sirtori, the neighboring butcher whose family business had occupied the street since 1951 and whose premises Zhou rented. Their conversations produced the idea for Ravioleria Sarpi, which opened in December 2015 with Zhou concentrating the operation on a handful of Chinese preparations at a moment when dedicated Chinese street food remained uncommon in Milan. Three women Zhou called the “zie Marie,” cooks from Dongbei in northeastern China without previous restaurant employment, prepared the dumplings as they would at home, connecting the new business with domestic cooking traditions that Zhou also associated with his grandmother. Recognition arrived rapidly when Gambero Rosso selected Ravioleria Sarpi as Lombardia's best street food in its 2017 guide, less than a year after opening. Zhou subsequently developed Le Nove Scodelle around Sichuan cooking, Baozi on Via Sarpi and Wonton in Porta Venezia, extending the original specialization into distinct Chinese restaurant formats. September 2021 brought Ravioleria Sarpi into Mercato Centrale Milano beside Stazione Centrale, where Zhou joined the opening group of culinary artisans with another dumpling workshop. A deeper turn arrived in December 2022 when Sirtori transferred his historic butcher shop and property to Zhou after years as his neighbor, landlord, meat supplier and friend, placing the business that had supplied Ravioleria from its beginning under Zhou's ownership while Sirtori continued working at the counter. Expansion reached Via Marghera in 2024, carrying the Ravioleria Sarpi name beyond Chinatown nearly nine years after a planned clothing shop had become a fifteen-square-meter dumpling kitchen.
Shuijiao remain the central preparation, with wrappers folded by hand around three tightly controlled fillings before cooking: beef with leek, pork with cabbage and a vegetarian mixture built from seasonal vegetables. The meat connects Chinese domestic technique with Italian sourcing through the neighboring Sirtori operation, whose beef supplied the shop from its earliest period. Flour follows the same approach through selected white, mixed and whole-grain varieties from Mulino Sobrino, giving the wrappers different grain compositions within the shop's deliberately narrow specialization. Bargero organic eggs and vegetables sourced from producers around Lombardy extend that ingredient strategy into preparations beyond the dumplings. Jianbing moves the cooking onto a hot griddle through a thin Beijing-style crêpe whose surface receives egg and savory components before being folded for eating on the street. The recipe became another consequential part of the shop's offer after Zhou introduced the preparation to Milan alongside the jiaozi. Dumplings may also leave uncooked for preparation at home, separating the same handmade product into immediate street food and fresh food for domestic cooking. A menu built around only a few preparations keeps the kitchen concentrated on repeated handwork, bringing Dongbei dumpling technique, Zhou's family memories and ingredients sourced from Italian producers into the same compact production cycle.
How to fold Ravioleria Sarpi into your trip.
Ravioleria Sarpi works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing Milan's passage from civic commemoration through industrial transport production into the institutional preservation of Italian design around the northern edge of Chinatown.
Begin at Cimitero Monumentale, created after Milan's municipality launched a competition in 1860 for a unified cemetery capable of combining ordinary burial with permanent family monuments and civic commemoration. Carlo Maciachini's proposal received final approval in 1863, burials began in 1866, the central ossuary followed in 1873 and the Famedio completed a decisive architectural phase in 1887 after its original function as a Catholic chapel had shifted toward a pantheon honoring Milanese figures whose work shaped the city and Italy. Continue to Fabbrica del Vapore, where Antonio Carminati, Giuseppe Pozzi and Carlo Toselli founded Carminati, Toselli & C. in 1899 to construct and repair railway and tram equipment beside Milan's expanding transport infrastructure. Reorganized as Società Italiana Carminati Toselli in 1907, the works reached 1,350 employees by 1919 and helped produce more than five hundred examples of the 1928 tram developed from the Peter Witt model before Attilio Carminati's opposition to conversion toward wartime production preceded the company's liquidation in 1935; the surviving industrial complex entered municipal cultural use from 2000. Conclude at ADI Design Museum, housed inside industrial buildings whose working history began as a horse-tram depot before Edison converted the site into a major thermoelectric plant from 1896. Restoration preserved that industrial inheritance for a new institution devoted to the Compasso d'Oro collection, connecting the site with the prize established in 1954 by Gio Ponti and La Rinascente before ADI assumed responsibility for it in 1958 and eventually opened the museum at Porta Volta in 2021 with hundreds of awarded objects and associated archival holdings. The progression moves from Maciachini's nineteenth-century civic project at Cimitero Monumentale through Carminati Toselli's rise and dissolution as a major producer of Milanese tram equipment into ADI Design Museum's conversion of transport and electrical infrastructure into a permanent home for the Compasso d'Oro collection.
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