Why you should experience Toyama in Milan, Italy.
Toyama is an inventive sushi restaurant where Porta Genova's after-dark dining culture, Japanese staples, increasingly elaborate fusion combinations and an all-you-can-eat format built for broad exploration converge beside the gateway to Milan's Navigli.
Set along Corso Cristoforo Colombo near Via Valenza and just steps from Stazione di Porta Genova, the restaurant occupies the threshold between the nineteenth-century railway district and the canal streets beyond, with tram tracks, compact apartment façades and the flow toward Via Vigevano giving this short stretch an unusually active evening character. Warm lighting, dark timber, upholstered seating and contemporary Asian decorative elements create a composed interior that separates the dining room from the movement immediately outside, giving successive orders a calmer setting than the surrounding streets suggest. Lunch and dinner develop through repeated small plates, moving freely among raw fish, flame-seared preparations, fried dishes, rice, noodles and elaborate rolls whose sauces and garnishes progressively expand the traditional sushi base. The result is an energetic Porta Genova restaurant whose breadth, polished interior and fusion-driven approach make it particularly suited to a long meal before continuing into the Navigli.
What you should know about Toyama.
Toyama is best known for developing its Corso Cristoforo Colombo restaurant into the first branch of a three-address Milan operation spanning Porta Genova, the historic center and Navigli. The original restaurant remains at Corso Cristoforo Colombo 3, where the company now explicitly labels it Toyama 1 and organizes its service around Japanese tradition, fusion reinterpretations and a fixed-price no-stop format at lunch and dinner. Expansion carried Toyama into Central Milan at Via Santa Maria alla Porta 12, establishing Toyama 2 within the ancient street network west of the Duomo. A third restaurant followed at Via Vigevano 13, placing Toyama 3 on the direct corridor between Porta Genova and the Darsena and giving the group two separate restaurants around the Navigli approaches. The three restaurants share the same Japanese-and-fusion concept, with sushi, sashimi, tempura and teppanyaki forming recurring anchors across the group. Toyama 3 also carried several creations associated with the group into the newer branch, including Cucchiaio di Toyama, specialized carpacci, flame-treated nigiri and increasingly elaborate uramaki, showing how the concept developed beyond its conventional Japanese foundation as the Milan operation expanded. The continuing Corso Colombo branch sits at the head of a small Milan restaurant family whose geographic growth now links Porta Genova, Centro and Navigli through a common culinary format.
Cucchiaio di Toyama concentrates three combinations into a single starter: red prawns with lumpfish roe, salmon with mushrooms and tuna with truffle flakes, all set against burrata cream. Millefoglie shifts the contrast toward marinated tuna and crisp rice pastry with truffle sauce, placing raw fish against crunch and deeper aromatic seasoning. Mini cones combine salmon tartare, pistachio, mango, miso cream and ikura, and tuna tacos introduce spicy tuna, truffle sauce, teriyaki and cherry tomato inside another compact composition. Uramaki extend the same fusion logic through fried shrimp, avocado, flame-seared salmon, miso, pistachio, mango and sauces drawn well beyond classical sushi combinations. Sashimi, nigiri and gunkan provide cleaner intervals among these richer constructions, leaving diners free to alternate direct cuts of fish with the restaurant's more elaborate combinations. That movement between restrained Japanese forms and burrata, truffle, fruit, pistachio and flame-seared fish defines the distinctive culinary range Toyama has developed around its fixed-price format.
How to fold Toyama into your trip.
Dinner at Toyama works as an excursion westward from Porta Genova through a former industrial corridor where Giorgio Armani, David Chipperfield and centuries of Naviglio history provide three sharply different encounters with Milanese design, collecting and architecture.
Begin at Armani/Silos, opened by Giorgio Armani on April 30, 2015 to mark forty years of his career inside a 1950 granary formerly used by a major international company. Armani personally conceived and oversaw the conversion, retaining the building's unusual external form and reorganizing 4,500 square meters across four levels around the presentation of his work. The permanent selection reaches from 1980 onward, connecting decades of clothing with the designer who directed the building's architectural conversion himself. Continue to Mudec - Museo delle Culture, created inside the former Ansaldo industrial complex after David Chipperfield Architects won the international competition for the project in 2000. The museum opened in 2015 after a fifteen-year development, occupying part of a 17,000-square-meter complex where zinc-titanium volumes surround an opaque-glass central structure and a flower-shaped covered agorà. Its civic ethnographic collection exceeds 7,000 objects spanning Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania, giving Chipperfield's conversion an institutional purpose extending far beyond the former factory. Conclude at San Cristoforo sul Naviglio, a pair of adjoining churches whose older component was rebuilt in 1192 and substantially altered during the fourteenth century. A pilgrims' hospital arrived in 1364, and the fifteenth-century Ducal Chapel followed under Visconti patronage after the plague of 1399, carrying the family biscione beside Milan's red cross on its façade. Ludovico il Moro met Beatrice d'Este here in 1491, adding a Sforza court episode to a site already bound to medieval travel, water routes and ducal Milan. The progression moves from Armani's conversion of a twentieth-century granary through Chipperfield's reconstruction of the Ansaldo site into San Cristoforo's Romanesque, Gothic and Visconti layers, carrying the evening from contemporary design toward the medieval waterway that shaped western Milan.
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