Why you should experience Røst in Milan, Italy.
Røst is an inventive Italian restaurant where Porta Venezia's independent dining culture, Hippolyte Vautrin's fascination with a remote Norwegian island, Lucia Gaspari's zero-waste foundation and the evolving kitchens of Piermaria Trischitta and Erminia Valenza converge around overlooked cuts, small producers and an equally serious commitment to wine.
Set along Via Melzo near Via Giuseppe Sirtori and just steps from Casa Guazzoni, the restaurant occupies a 65-square-meter former auto-parts shop transformed by Tiziano Vudafieri and Claudio Saverino into two compact rooms centered on food, wine and the people supplying both. Sixteen ceramic portraits of producers form a Wall of Fame arranged into the ø of Røst, and the original porphyry floor survives beneath marble tables, velvet seating, a solid-oak bar and a suspended brass-and-glass bottle rack. Vudafieri built a lamp from automobile headlights of different periods as a direct reference to the shop that previously occupied the premises, and Roberto Coda Zabetta contributed Terrazzo behind the bar. The result is a Porta Venezia restaurant where producers, architectural remnants and changing generations of cooks remain visible within the physical fabric of a project built around recovering overlooked ingredients and older Italian food traditions.
What you should know about Røst.
Røst is best known for Hippolyte Vautrin, Enrico Murru and Lucia Gaspari's transformation of a proposed wine bar with small plates into a restaurant devoted to Italian producers, overlooked cuts and seasonal cooking, a project whose name reaches back to Venetian merchant Pietro Querini's fifteenth-century encounter with stockfish on the Norwegian island of Røst. Vautrin entered the project with experience behind nearby Japanese restaurant Kanpai, and Querini's journey fascinated him as an example of a foreign encounter becoming embedded in Italian food culture. Murru took responsibility for the dining room and wine, building an opening collection of more than 170 labels with 60 percent from Italy, 40 percent from France and a small number from elsewhere. The culinary direction changed decisively when the pair encountered Gaspari. Born near Verona, she had studied communication design before moving to Berlin for five years, where weekend work in an Italian restaurant redirected her career toward cooking. Gaspari returned to Italy for ALMA and graduated in 2016. Training followed through kitchens including Tokuyoshi and the Alajmo group in Italy, Relæ in Copenhagen and Silo in England, whose elimination of food waste strongly influenced her own work. Røst became her first position as chef. The trio rebuilt the former auto-parts shop from scratch and opened in November 2019 with a short menu that changed with deliveries from farmers, livestock producers and other small suppliers. Vegetables and lesser-used cuts sat at its center, and conventional divisions between starters, first courses and main courses disappeared in favor of dishes designed for sharing. Gaspari left in 2021 to pursue her own project in Lessinia. Vautrin and Murru chose Catania-born Piermaria Trischitta as her successor, bringing in a cook whose international development had included Hamburg, Zurich and Copenhagen, including 108. Trischitta preserved Røst's producer-driven foundation through five years at the stove and developed dishes through repeated refinement, with his 2025 work including a four-hands collaboration with former Horto executive chef Alberto Toè. Vautrin expanded the project again in late 2025 with neighboring Bar Sandøy, creating a second Via Melzo venue tied to Røst. Another culinary chapter emerged during 2026 as Pantelleria-born Erminia Valenza, previously chef at Ringa and Stazione Vucciria, moved from Røst's sous-chef position toward leadership of its kitchen.
Røst's cooking gives inexpensive or neglected ingredients enough technical attention to make their original character more pronounced. The house mondeghili preserve Milan's fried-meatball tradition, a preparation that survived the transition from Gaspari to Trischitta and became one of the restaurant's longest-running dishes. Baccalà supplies another recurring thread, linking the kitchen back to the stockfish journey behind the restaurant's name. Trischitta's raw amberjack placed sashimi-like slices over reduced milk with white miso, fig-leaf oil and roveja, an ancient legume supplying an earthy counterpoint beneath the fish. Another preparation paired smoked eggplant with braised cirietti and sheep's ricotta. Sorgo appeared with trombetta zucchini and stracchino all'antica, bringing an old cereal into a creamy vegetable composition. Beef diaphragm became tartare with Carpino broad beans and Monte Poro pecorino, extending the kitchen's longstanding interest in less fashionable cuts. Recent cooking has carried that approach into roasted amberjack collar with tzatziki and salad, using a collagen-rich section of the fish that many kitchens discard. The restaurant's own take-home repertoire provides another view of whole-product cooking through shredded tongue with green cabbage, Friulian Corona Rossa apple, salsa verde and brown jus; chickpea soup with Ceci di Cicerale, Nebrodi guanciale and black cabbage; and pumpkin cream finished with sapa and crisp pumpkin skin. Wine remains a parallel reason for the restaurant's existence, with organic, biodynamic and low-intervention bottles chosen through direct relationships with small growers and poured alongside dishes whose composition changes with season and supply.
How to fold Røst into your trip.
Røst works as the meal anchor for an afternoon tracing Milanese Liberty experimentation, twentieth-century private collecting and Piero Portaluppi's conversion of bourgeois domestic architecture into one of the city's richest surviving settings for modern Italian art.
Begin at Casa Guazzoni, commissioned by master builder Giacomo Guazzoni from Giovanni Battista Bossi and constructed between 1904 and 1906 on land previously occupied by the Società Anonima degli Omnibus, operator of Milan's horse-drawn public transport. Bossi covered the building with brick, sculpted cement and dense floral decoration; Tarcisio Pogliani produced clay originals for the exterior figures, and Paolo Sala painted the interior frescoes. Alessandro Mazzucotelli supplied wrought-iron work for the balconies and carriage entrance, giving metal an ornamental role equal to the building's sculpted façade. Continue to Albergo Diurno Venezia, the subterranean public-service complex developed beneath Piazza Oberdan between 1923 and 1925 and opened in January 1926. Piero Portaluppi shaped much of its architecture, furnishings and decoration across 1,200 square meters, where barbers, baths, showers, toilets, postal services and other facilities once served Milanese residents and travelers beneath the square. Conclude at Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano, housed in the apartment where engineer Antonio Boschi and ceramicist Marieda Di Stefano lived from 1931. Piero Portaluppi designed their building between 1929 and 1931 for Marieda's father Francesco Di Stefano and his family. Antonio spent most of his engineering career at Pirelli and patented the GIUBO transmission coupling, yet he and Marieda devoted enormous energy to collecting contemporary art and formed friendships with artists before many achieved broad recognition. Their collection exceeded two thousand works, with Antonio donating it to Milan after Marieda's death. Roughly three hundred pieces now fill eleven rooms, spanning Boccioni, Carrà, Sironi, Morandi, De Pisis, de Chirico, Fontana and Piero Manzoni. The progression moves from Bossi, Pogliani, Sala and Mazzucotelli's Liberty craftsmanship through Portaluppi's subterranean public architecture into Antonio Boschi and Marieda Di Stefano's extraordinary private collection, tracing three forms of Milanese artistic experimentation before dinner at Røst.
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