Why you should experience Ta-Hua in Milan, Italy.
Ta-Hua is an enduring Hong Kong restaurant where Centrale's international character, Via Fara's proximity to Milan's modern business district, the intimacy of a family dining room and the communal traditions of Cantonese cooking converge just north of Milano Centrale.
Set along Via Gustavo Fara near Via Antonio Locatelli and just steps from the Pirelli Tower, the restaurant occupies the quieter western edge of Centrale, where residential streets meet the high-rise architecture extending toward Porta Nuova. Dark surfaces, warm illumination and closely arranged tables give the dining room a composed intimacy, with Chinese decorative elements adding visual depth. Lunch and dinner unfold through numerous small plates before larger seafood, meat and noodle preparations reach the table, encouraging a gradual shared meal whose pace differs markedly from the quick circulation of the nearby station district. The result is a polished neighborhood restaurant whose measured dining rhythm brings Hong Kong cooking into one of Milan's most internationally connected quarters.
What you should know about Ta-Hua.
Ta-Hua is best known for the Shou family's multigenerational stewardship of Hong Kong cooking in Milan, beginning with Chung Yung Shou and his wife Sucin in 1979. The couple had arrived from Hong Kong and became known in Italy as Paolo and Lidia, establishing the restaurant decades before Milan developed its present breadth of regional Chinese dining. Their children Antonio and Monica were born in Milan and later assumed responsibility for Ta-Hua, with Monica's husband Mauro Femmino joining the second generation. The family's connection with Milan's Chinese community extended beyond the dining room. A lower-level room at an earlier stage of Ta-Hua's Via Fara history held a mahjong table where Chinese families and friends gathered, placing the restaurant within the social world surrounding the city's established immigrant community. A major physical transition followed around 2007, when Ta-Hua moved into its present premises and gained a larger setting for the family's cooking. Architect Giancarlo Tintori subsequently shaped the restaurant through a minimalist treatment built around exposed brick, an open kitchen, illuminated walls and suspended timber elements. Chinese artist Fan Zen supplied another cultural layer through a painting incorporated into the interior. Dim sum remained the culinary continuity across those changes. Ta-Hua had served the Hong Kong and Canton tradition since its first generation, retaining the connection between small handmade dishes and yum cha as the restaurant modernized around them. Sunday service preserved a particularly direct link with that custom through dim sum as a traditional weekend ritual. Antonio Shou has carried the family project forward through a principle inherited from his parents: contemporary Chinese cooking enters the restaurant without severing the techniques and traditions that established it. More than four decades after Chung Yung Shou and Sucin began the project, second-generation stewardship, Tintori's redesign and the continuing dim sum practice have allowed Ta-Hua to evolve without surrendering the Hong Kong foundation established in 1979.
The handmade dim sum repertoire begins with translucent wrappers around combinations of prawn, pork, vegetables and seafood before bao introduce a softer steamed dough. Baozi Ta-Hua encloses pork, and char siu versions bring long-cooked pork together with honey and caramelized soy. Black char siu bao changes the presentation through dark dough surrounding the same sweet-savory profile. Sesame wontons pair prawn filling with sesame sauce, then fried wontons transform the wrapper through crisp heat. Steamed rice cannelloni place prawns inside a softer rice-based sheet. Daikon cake combines turnip with grilled pancetta, creating a denser savory preparation among the smaller plates. Turbot baked in crust with vegetables moves the kitchen toward a substantial seafood centerpiece. Prawns with ginger and asparagus sharpen shellfish sweetness through fresh ginger and vegetal bite, and beef fillet cooked in the chef's pot gives the meat selection a concentrated high-heat preparation. Rice noodles extend the Hong Kong repertoire through stir-fried dishes, with Cantonese rice providing another grain-centered route through the meal. Desserts remain a distinct house practice under the restaurant's pastry program, extending the kitchen's authorship beyond dim sum and savory Cantonese cooking. The complete sequence moves from delicate steamed wrappers through fried dough, seafood, beef, noodles and pastry, preserving the breadth of a Hong Kong table inside a restaurant whose handmade dim sum remains its culinary center.
How to fold Ta-Hua into your trip.
Ta-Hua works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing religious care, postwar corporate ambition and the preservation of twentieth-century Milanese history across Centrale and the northern edge of Porta Nuova.
Begin at Santuario di San Camillo De Lellis, whose history reaches back to 1594, when Camillo de Lellis and members of his order arrived in Milan at the invitation of Archbishop Gaspare Visconti to care for patients at Ca' Granda. Napoleonic suppression expelled the Camillians in 1800, but Cardinal Andrea Carlo Ferrari brought them back in 1896; Spirito Maria Chiappetta designed their new neo-Gothic sanctuary, whose first stone Ferrari blessed in 1900 before its inauguration in 1912. Continue to Pirelli Tower, conceived after Alberto and Piero Pirelli decided to build a new corporate headquarters near the site of the company's first factory. Gio Ponti led the architectural project with Giuseppe Valtolina, Egidio Dell'Orto, Antonio Fornaroli and Alberto Rosselli, and engineers Pier Luigi Nervi and Arturo Danusso developed the reinforced-concrete structure; completed in 1960, the 127-meter tower compressed 31 storeys into a tapered profile whose structural daring made it a defining work of Italian postwar modernism. Conclude at Casa della Memoria, developed to bring institutions devoted to the Resistance, Nazi deportations, terrorism and twentieth-century political violence into a shared cultural home. Milanese studio Baukuh won the architectural competition in 2011, construction followed between 2013 and 2015 and the building opened on April 24, 2015, one day before the seventieth anniversary of Liberation, accompanied by Danny Rose's video installation Gli occhi della resistenza. The progression moves from Camillo de Lellis and Ferrari's centuries-spanning tradition of care through Ponti and Nervi's postwar corporate tower into Baukuh's architectural preservation of Milanese memory, connecting religion, industry and twentieth-century history around Ta-Hua.
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