Why you should experience Su Garden in Milan, Italy.
Su Garden is a cultivated Asian restaurant where Repubblica's metropolitan character, the eastern edge of Centrale's cosmopolitan dining culture, Cantonese culinary tradition and a garden-inspired design concept converge along Via Carlo Tenca.
Set along Via Carlo Tenca near Via Lazzaretto and just steps from Piazza della Repubblica, the restaurant occupies a central pocket where nineteenth-century residential streets connect Porta Venezia with the commercial territory surrounding Milano Centrale. Dark timber, bamboo-like surfaces, vegetation and soft illumination carry natural references across the dining room before a sheltered courtyard extends the restaurant into a quieter exterior setting. Meals unfold through steamed, wok-fired, grilled and fried preparations, allowing delicate seafood and dumplings to give way gradually to stronger spice, caramelization and richer meat dishes. The result is a composed urban restaurant whose retreat-like atmosphere provides a measured setting for an Asian repertoire developed across several culinary traditions.
What you should know about Su Garden.
Su Garden is best known for bringing together owners Julian Wang and Jessica Zhu with Wenzhou-born chef Chong, whose careers connect the restaurant with several generations of Chinese hospitality in northern Italy. Jessica arrived in Italy at nine and grew up around her family's restaurants in Bergamo during the 1980s, making professional hospitality part of her life long before Su Garden. Chong was born in Wenzhou in 1965 and moved to Italy in 1989, where his study of local flavors joined an existing command of Asian culinary traditions. Two decades in a major Milanese restaurant kitchen followed. His career also passed through Shanghai and Giardino di Giada, two established names in Milanese Chinese dining, before he took control of Su Garden's kitchen. Wang and Zhu developed the restaurant with architect Davide Frisoni, whose design translated the garden concept into raw wood resembling bamboo, cherrywood furniture, palms and earth-toned interiors. Tecnam Progetti developed the project and AFA Arredamenti executed the fit-out, completing the Via Tenca restaurant in 2011. Zhu later spent a decade studying wine seriously, extending Su Garden's hospitality beyond Chinese cooking into a deeper engagement with European wine culture. That pursuit brought her into the 2025 Simply the Best gathering alongside Italian wine producers and sommeliers before she opened Renen Wine in Porta Venezia in December 2025. Named for her grandfather through the Chinese concepts of benevolence and gratitude, the new project carries Su Garden's culinary lineage forward through bao prepared with its kitchen and a cellar exceeding 300 labels. Wang, Zhu, Chong, Frisoni and the later Renen project give Su Garden an unusually interconnected history spanning immigrant restaurant families, veteran Chinese cooking, authored interior design and the evolution of Chinese food-and-wine culture in contemporary Milan.
Cantonese shrimp siu mai establish the kitchen's gentler register through steamed wrappers enclosing shellfish, allowing sweetness and soft texture to lead before stronger flavors enter the meal. Steamed sea bass develops that delicacy through ginger and spring onion, whose aromatic heat perfumes the fish. Fresh mango then shifts the same emphasis on brightness into wok-fired chicken, where fruit sweetness meets savory browning and the softer texture of the meat. Sichuan aubergines turn the sequence toward chile and deeper seasoning, giving vegetables a more concentrated heat before kung pao chicken carries spice into a nutty, savory preparation. Honey-glazed pork ribs answer with caramelized sweetness, their sticky exterior providing a richer counterpoint to the earlier steamed dishes. Peking duck deepens the roasted register through crisp skin and fatty meat, then jasmine rice and Singapore-style curry noodles absorb the sauces and aromatic intensity accumulated across the table. Su Garden builds its Asian cooking through controlled escalation, moving from Cantonese steaming and ginger toward fresh fruit, chile, wok heat, honey glaze and roasting until delicacy and intensity occupy different stages of the same meal.
How to fold Su Garden into your trip.
Su Garden works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing aristocratic patronage, Enlightenment-era public landscape and the institutional development of natural science across the territory between Repubblica and Porta Venezia.
Begin at Palazzo Dugnani, constructed from the Cavalchini family residence before Giuseppe Casati acquired the property in 1730 and commissioned Giambattista Tiepolo to decorate its grand salon the following year. The Dugnani family acquired the palace in 1753, and the Accademia dei Fenici began meeting there in 1762, turning the residence into a center for Milanese literary culture before Giovanni Vimercati later assembled natural-history collections inside its rooms. Continue to Giardini Indro Montanelli, where Habsburg viceroy Ferdinand commissioned Giuseppe Piermarini to create Milan's first public garden during the late eighteenth century. Giuseppe Balzaretto expanded the grounds during the nineteenth century through an English-style landscape of clearings, water and artificial terrain, then Emilio Alemagna reshaped them after the major exhibitions of the 1870s and 1880s. Conclude at Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano, founded in 1838 through the collections of Giuseppe De Cristoforis and Giorgio Jan. Giovanni Ceruti designed its purpose-built home during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, creating Italy's first architecture conceived specifically as a museum and drawing inspiration from the great natural-history institutions emerging elsewhere in Europe. The progression moves from Casati, Tiepolo, the Dugnani and Vimercati's palace through Piermarini, Balzaretto and Alemagna's public landscape into De Cristoforis, Jan and Ceruti's scientific institution, tracing the movement of art, collecting and knowledge from private Milanese patronage into public culture.
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