Why you should experience Taverna degli Amici in Milan, Italy.
Taverna degli Amici is a convivial grill restaurant where Porta Romana's established dining culture, southern Italian generosity, communal tables and a cellar-driven approach to meat converge inside a characterful Via Spartaco institution.
Set along Via Spartaco near Via Cadore and just steps from the eastern stretch of Corso di Porta Romana, the restaurant occupies a residential pocket where nineteenth-century blocks, neighborhood businesses and dining rooms extend toward the gardens and cultural institutions surrounding Porta Vittoria. Timber furnishings, framed artwork, handwritten quotations and walls devoted to music and literature distinguish a succession of intimate rooms, with references to Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour and Fabrizio De André giving different corners their own character. Lunch carries the energy of a long-established neighborhood address, and dinner settles into extended meals built around shared starters, substantial first courses, grilled meats, cheese and wine, with groups naturally gathering around the restaurant's broad tables. The result is a deeply personal Milanese taverna whose warmth comes from accumulated character, transforming a meal in Porta Romana into an experience shaped by conviviality, abundance and the pleasures of lingering at the table.
What you should know about Taverna degli Amici.
Taverna degli Amici is best known for the life of founder Ernesto Notaro, whose route from Calabria to Milan shaped the restaurant long before he and his wife Rita opened it in 1997. Notaro was born in 1948 in Tiriolo, a Calabrian hill town between the Ionian and Tyrrhenian coasts, and learned hospitality through local strippoli, inexpensive communal trattorias serving students, workers and intellectuals. His early Milan years brought him into another generation of those establishments, where Bulgarian artist Christo became a customer during the 1970 project that wrapped the Vittorio Emanuele II monument in Piazza Duomo and asked to make Notaro's portrait. Ernesto met Rita in 1979, and their partnership eventually extended into business after the birth of Luisa and Diego. Notaro subsequently operated a company in Precotto selling bulk wine, then saw that livelihood collapse amid the 1986 methanol wine scandal as public confidence in unpackaged wine disappeared across Italy. A difficult decade followed before Ernesto and Rita established Taverna degli Amici on Via Spartaco, drawing directly upon the food and communal habits he had absorbed in the strippoli. Large shared tables recalled village festivals, grilled meat became the culinary foundation and Rita contributed the eggplant preparations and pasta that Notaro associated with home. Success drove physical expansion over the following decade as the restaurant gradually occupied the ground floor, upper floor and cellar of the property. The cellar developed into another major component during the 2000s, eventually surpassing 500 Italian and international labels and reinforcing Notaro's longstanding connection with wine through a radically different business chapter. Writers, lawyers, magistrates, politicians, physicians and musicians subsequently passed through the dining room, yet Notaro maintained a deliberate discretion about individual patrons as the restaurant approached its thirtieth anniversary in 2026.
The current menu begins with crostino Toscano, lardo-topped crostini, 24-month Parma ham, Cecina de León and selections of goose and duck breast before moving through soups, pasta and the grill. Linguine with 'nduja carries Calabrian heat into the first courses, and another linguine preparation combines fava beans with guanciale and pecorino for a denser balance of sweetness, cured pork and aged cheese. Tagliatelle with wild-boar ragù pushes toward deeper braised flavors, with orecchiette al ragù del macellaio and trippa alla calabrese extending the kitchen's treatment of meat beyond the grill. Charcoal cooking begins with pork coppa, sausage, spicy black-pig salamella and sheep arrosticini before moving through Argentine and Uruguayan sirloin. Bavarian scottona appears as both a 300-gram rib steak and a 200-gram fillet, allowing the same beef category to be explored through contrasting cuts and proportions. Larger formats culminate in 600-gram scottona rib steak and Fiorentina offered at 800 grams or 1.1 kilograms, turning the grill into the centerpiece for a shared main course. Side dishes return to regional cooking through fagioli all'uccelletto, Calabrian tomatoes, caponata and sautéed catalogna, and dessert closes through dark-chocolate mousse, three-chocolate mousse, berry crostata and tiramisù. Taverna degli Amici builds its current cooking through regional Italian dishes and an unusually broad range of charcoal-grilled cuts, carrying the founders' original emphasis on substantial communal food into a menu spanning Calabria, Tuscany, Rome and international beef traditions.
How to fold Taverna degli Amici into your trip.
Taverna degli Amici works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing Milanese hospital history, early twentieth-century market architecture and rebellious postwar theater through the eastern Porta Romana district.
Begin at Rotonda della Besana, developed from 1695 as the Foppone dell'Ospedale Maggiore after the hospital's existing burial ground became inadequate. Francesco Croce, Attilio Arrigoni and Francesco Raffagno contributed to the complex, where a porticoed cemetery enclosure surrounds the former Church of San Michele; later uses encompassed a lazaretto, barracks and hay storage before Comune di Milano acquired the property in 1939 and converted it into a public garden and cultural site. Continue to Palazzina Liberty Dario Fo e Franca Rame, designed by Alberto Migliorini in 1908 within the new Verziere fruit and vegetable market as a meeting and refreshment pavilion for merchants. The market disappeared in 1965, and Dario Fo, Franca Rame and their La Comune collective occupied the surviving pavilion in 1974, turning a former commercial building into an important center for participatory political theater until 1980; Milan formally dedicated the building to Fo and Rame in 2017. Conclude at San Bernardino alle Ossa, whose origins connect directly with a hospital founded by Gotifredo da Busserò in 1145 and the cemetery established for those who died there. Insufficient burial capacity led to construction of an ossuary chamber in 1210, and after a bell-tower collapse destroyed the structure in 1642, the surviving ossuary was completed in 1695 and decorated by Sebastiano Ricci in 1693 and 1694, with human skulls and bones covering much of its interior architecture. The progression moves from the Ospedale Maggiore's seventeenth-century burial complex through Migliorini's market pavilion and Fo and Rame's theatrical occupation into San Bernardino's medieval hospital origins and Baroque ossuary, revealing successive institutions of care, commerce, performance and remembrance around Taverna degli Amici.
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