Why you should experience Ristorante Spore in Milan, Italy.
Ristorante Spore is an inventive fermentation restaurant where Porta Romana's independent dining culture, Mariasole Cuomo's family connection to food, Giacomo Venturoli's northern European restaurant career and years spent studying fermentation in Copenhagen converge around a kitchen producing its own miso, shoyu, kombucha, vinegar and other ferments.
Set along Via Passo Buole near Corso Lodi and just steps from the streets connecting Porta Romana with Fondazione Prada, the restaurant occupies an intimate dining room of 25 seats with a counter facing directly into the kitchen and additional tables extending into a small internal courtyard. Cuomo and Venturoli kept the room deliberately restrained, giving the open kitchen and fermentation work greater prominence within a restaurant shaped by their years in Copenhagen. A dedicated laboratory supports the dining room from behind the scenes, supplying ferments that enter the changing tasting menus across vegetables, seafood, meat and desserts. The result is a Porta Romana restaurant where the small dining room opens onto a much larger technical project driven by two careers formed across Italy, Denmark and Britain.
What you should know about Ristorante Spore.
Ristorante Spore is best known for Mariasole Cuomo and Giacomo Venturoli turning careers shaped across Pollenzo, London, Copenhagen and some of Europe's most experimental kitchens into a Milan restaurant devoted to fermentation. Cuomo's route toward food began inside her family. Her mother and aunts transmitted their interest in cooking, her grandfather and father connected her with gardening and fishing, and her father's tomato business took him as far as Japan. Stories from those journeys prompted Cuomo's mother to reproduce Asian dishes at home, giving their daughter an early connection with flavors that later became central to her professional work. Cuomo studied Gastronomic Sciences at the University of Pollenzo before moving to Denmark for a master's degree in Food Innovation and Health. Copenhagen changed the direction of her cooking. Work at Nordic Food Lab deepened her knowledge of fermentation, and a later period inside Noma's Fermentation Lab became a decisive professional turn. She also worked at Yoji Tokuyoshi's restaurant in Milan and Bæst in Copenhagen before becoming creative sous-chef to Lisa Lov at Tigermom. Venturoli developed along another route. He worked in kitchens including Sketch and The Clove Club in London and Bæst in Copenhagen, where the boundary between cooks and dining-room staff exposed him to a more fluid model of restaurant service. He subsequently studied Global Studies at Roskilde University. Cuomo and Venturoli met in Copenhagen, and their accumulated Danish experience made fermentation an autobiographical foundation for the restaurant they eventually planned together. Cuomo's Noma period supplied the final push. The intensity of that internship convinced her to return to Italy and build a workplace on her own terms. The pair chose Milan, financed the project with a small bank loan and family assistance and opened Spore in summer 2022. Recognition followed quickly. Gambero Rosso selected Spore as its 2024 Novità dell'anno in Lombardia and later awarded the restaurant a Foglia, with Cuomo's kitchen and Venturoli's natural-wine program continuing as the two complementary halves of the project.
Fermentation enters the kitchen as an ingredient-production system, with miso, shoyu, kombucha, vinegar, koji preparations and other cultures made inside Spore's own laboratory. Tagliolino with butter, kimchi and marinated egg yolk has become one of Cuomo's recurring signatures, coating fresh pasta in dairy richness before fermented cabbage and cured yolk sharpen its depth. A grilled scallion preparation layers moromi mayonnaise with burnt-scallion oil and furikake. Fresh-cheese ravioli use koji inside the filling before XO sauce, lemon and parsley extend the savory profile. Grilled diaphragm receives shiokoji before black-pepper jus, fermented turnips and spicy agretti complete the plate. Earlier menus pushed the same technique through mackerel tartare with escarole seaweed, fermented turnips, horseradish and moromi mayonnaise. Tom kha placed mussels and clams beside fermented potatoes, peas, lime, basil, pancetta and chile. Yakitori paired chicken with lettuce, lemongrass tamari, rice and coriander. A 2025 trout preparation cooked a large Dolomite fish in butter, then joined it with cream kefir, lovage oil, salted and lightly pickled wild-garlic capers and umeboshi. The current winter menu continues the method through grey-mullet sashimi, savoy cabbage puttanesca, black lasagna, pumpkin tempura and five-spice duck before a craquelin choux dessert. Cuomo changes the tasting sequence every two months, allowing the contents of the fermentation laboratory to keep generating new combinations long after individual dishes disappear.
How to fold Ristorante Spore into your trip.
Ristorante Spore works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing southern Milan from Baroque responses to hospital burial through twentieth-century industrial production into Rem Koolhaas and OMA's conversion of a former distillery for contemporary art.
Begin at Rotonda della Besana, created after the burial ground serving Milan's Ospedale Maggiore became inadequate during the seventeenth century. Construction began in 1695 under Attilio Arrigoni, with the new cemetery receiving its first burials in July 1697. Water infiltration and rising burial demand prompted Francesco Croce to develop the great surrounding portico from 1719, financed in part by silk merchant Giambattista Annone and completed in 1731. Continue south to Fondazione Prada, where a distillery established during the 1910s left warehouses, silos and industrial buildings across a site later transformed by OMA under Rem Koolhaas. The architectural project preserved seven existing structures and inserted three new ones, Podium, Cinema and Torre, across a 19,000-square-meter compound. Torre completed the complex as a 60-meter white-concrete building whose nine levels change height as the structure rises. Conclude at Chiaravalle Abbey, founded after Bernard of Clairvaux arrived in Milan in 1135 during the conflict between Pope Innocent II and Antipope Anacletus II. Cistercian monks reclaimed marshland south of the city and developed an agricultural monastery whose medieval expansion helped reorganize the surrounding countryside. Francesco Pecorari completed the distinctive Ciribiciaccola tower during the fourteenth century, adding the brick structure that still rises above the abbey complex. The progression moves from Cistercian reclamation and agricultural production through Milan's Baroque response to urban burial and the industrial structures later transformed by OMA, tracing successive reinventions of the territory surrounding Ristorante Spore.
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