Why you should experience Rossini Ristorante Pizzeria in Milan, Italy.
Rossini Ristorante Pizzeria is a characterful Italian restaurant where Missori's medieval street pattern, Latvian restaurateur Guntars Skrastiņš's two-decade pursuit of Italian cooking, Gioachino Rossini's celebrated appetite and a Milanese menu spanning saffron risotto to pizza converge minutes from the Duomo.
Set along Via dei Piatti near Via Torino and just steps from Santa Maria presso San Satiro, the restaurant occupies a narrow Centro Storico street within the dense medieval fabric south of Piazza del Duomo. Brick walls and arched ceilings give the dining rooms a rustic architectural foundation, with timber furnishings and a substantial wine display carrying the atmosphere established by Rossini restaurants before the Milan branch existed. Founder Guntars Skrastiņš spent five years searching Milan for suitable premises, then another year constructing the restaurant after securing a former fast-food site from Luigi and Siena Casalotto. The result is a Missori restaurant whose intimate central address represents the culmination of a hospitality journey that began hundreds of miles north in Latvia and eventually brought Skrastiņš's Italian restaurant project into Italy itself.
What you should know about Rossini Ristorante Pizzeria.
Rossini Ristorante Pizzeria is best known for Latvian founder Guntars Skrastiņš's un journey from teenage car repair in Valmiera to opening an Italian restaurant in Central Milan after nearly two decades spent learning hospitality and building the Rossini name. Skrastiņš was seventeen in 1993 and moved into automobile repair and painting at eighteen, with his relative Zigmunds Ivaņinoks, an influential Latvian bartender, helping awaken his interest in hospitality. He later moved to Riga for professional courses and entered the newly opened Olē nightclub in 1997 as a bartender's assistant. Three months took him behind the bar, followed by work at Monmantra and then a decisive move in 2000 to Italian restaurant Monterosso. Italian food became the direction of his career before he had even visited Italy. Skrastiņš and his brother Gunvaldis eventually spent five years developing their first restaurant in their native Valmiera, investing Guntars's earnings from Riga into construction and opening Rossini in May 2005. Gunvaldis designed the interiors, beginning a creative role he continued across the brothers' restaurants. The project took its name from composer and gourmand Gioachino Rossini after Guntars learned about him from an Italian colleague named Adriano at Monterosso. Latvia's 2008 financial crisis nearly ended the venture. Guntars responded by seeking a Riga location, failed to secure financing from several lenders and eventually obtained support from SEB. He and Gunvaldis performed much of the construction themselves, opening Rossini on Pumpura Street on April 4, 2009. Growing demand led to a larger Riga address on Dzirnavu Street in 2014. Italy became Guntars's next ambition. Years of traveling through the country convinced him to attempt an Italian restaurant in Milan, yet finding premises took another five years. The breakthrough came through Luigi and Siena Casalotto, elderly operators of a fast-food business on Via dei Piatti who were ready to leave the industry and agreed to transfer their restaurant rights and lease the premises. Construction consumed a full year and required workers brought from Latvia as costs multiplied. Rossini Milano opened in 2016, placing Skrastiņš's restaurant concept inside the country whose cooking had first redirected his career sixteen years earlier.
Rossini Milano keeps the food considerably closer to Italian tradition than the founder's Latvian restaurants, a distinction Skrastiņš deliberately built into the Milan branch. Vitello tonnato begins with steamed veal, tuna sauce and Pantelleria capers. A savory Parmigiano Reggiano cannolo carries basil ricotta mousse, pistachio and cherry tomatoes, turning the familiar pastry form toward an antipasto. Linguine all'astice combines lobster with cherry tomatoes and fresh basil, and another linguine preparation cooks veraci clams in white wine. Milan enters directly through saffron risotto, with a second version adding ossobuco. Beetroot risotto changes the rice through Gorgonzola cream, hazelnut crumble and sour-cherry sauce, then Parmigiano risotto takes black truffle as its finishing ingredient. Veal cheek receives red-wine braising before reaching a Jerusalem-artichoke cream. Pizza extends the kitchen through San Marzano tomato and fior di latte, with the Napoletana adding Cantabrian anchovies and oregano. The house Rossini pizza layers San Marzano tomato with raw buffalo mozzarella, rocket, culatello and Grana. That combination of Milanese staples, seafood pasta, braised meat and pizza fulfills the simpler, more strictly Italian direction Skrastiņš wanted for the restaurant he spent years trying to establish in Milan.
How to fold Rossini Ristorante Pizzeria into your trip.
Rossini Ristorante Pizzeria works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing Milan's Renaissance experimentation, Counter-Reformation scholarship and Leonardo da Vinci's extraordinary surviving body of drawings through the streets immediately south and west of the Duomo.
Begin at Santa Maria presso San Satiro, whose oldest nucleus reaches the ninth-century sacellum commissioned by Archbishop Ansperto before Gian Galeazzo Sforza promoted a new church during the late fifteenth century. Donato Bramante entered the project around 1482 and confronted severe spatial limits behind the altar with his celebrated false choir, compressing an apparent apse nearly ten meters deep into just 97 centimeters through perspective, relief and painted architectural forms. Agostino de Fondulis contributed terracotta decoration, and Bramante's octagonal sacristy developed another major Renaissance experiment beside the older San Satiro structure. Continue to Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, founded by Cardinal Federico Borromeo in 1607 and inaugurated on December 8, 1609 as one of the earliest libraries open to anyone able to read and write. Borromeo expanded his institution with the Pinacoteca in 1618 and Accademia del Disegno in 1620. The holdings now exceed one million printed volumes and nearly 40,000 manuscripts, alongside 12,000 drawings and 22,000 engravings. Conclude inside the Ambrosiana's Pinacoteca with Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus, the immense compilation assembled after Leonardo's death from drawings and notes spanning mechanics, mathematics, astronomy, botany, architecture, military engineering and studies of flight. Sculptor Pompeo Leoni gathered dispersed sheets into the volume during the late sixteenth century, and Marquis Galeazzo Arconati donated it to the Ambrosiana in 1637. The progression moves from Bramante's manipulation of architectural perspective through Federico Borromeo's scholarly institution into Leonardo's investigations across art, machines and the natural world, concentrating three chapters of Milanese intellectual history around Rossini Ristorante Pizzeria.
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