Why you should experience Trattoria Lobster & More in Milan, Italy.
Trattoria Lobster & More is a seafood trattoria where Brera's intimate restaurant culture, Hong Haifu's stewardship of a pre-existing Via Palermo dining address, an evolution from Milanese cooking toward fish and shellfish and a menu crossing Mediterranean tradition with East Asian accents converge near the northern edge of the district.
Set along Via Palermo near Corso Garibaldi and just steps from La Pelota, the restaurant occupies a narrow Brera street where nineteenth-century façades, independent dining rooms, fashion spaces and the former Basque sferisterio compress several layers of the neighborhood into a short walk between Moscova and the historic center. The dining room retains the direct proportions of a traditional trattoria, with white-clothed tables, dark timber, framed pictures and seafood displayed without the theatrical architecture associated with larger specialist fish restaurants. Dinner moves easily between raw shellfish, grilled fish, fresh pasta and lobster before ponzu, teriyaki, curry and soft-shell crab introduce a second culinary current, making the room feel rooted in Italian trattoria culture without restricting the kitchen to a single regional tradition. The result is a distinctive Brera restaurant whose modest physical scale opens onto a surprisingly broad seafood repertoire shaped by both the address's earlier Milanese cooking and its present international reach.
What you should know about Trattoria Lobster & More.
Trattoria Lobster & More is best known for recasting the Via Palermo restaurant historically associated with Trattoria C'Era Una Volta under Hong Haifu into a seafood-focused operation that still retains traces of its earlier Milanese repertoire. Hong Haifu's stewardship at Via Palermo 20 was established by 2016, and the C'Era Una Volta name remained publicly connected with the address through the pandemic period. Milan subsequently placed Hong's trattoria within the Brera commercial district, confirming the operation's continuing presence there before Lobster & More became the dominant public-facing name. That earlier restaurant centered substantially on Italian cooking; the present operation shifts its emphasis toward fish, Mediterranean seafood and fusion preparations yet still keeps ossobuco with risotto alla milanese and risotto al salto beside lobster, oysters and raw seafood. The continuity is unusually legible in the restaurant's own contact infrastructure: Lobster & More occupies the same Via Palermo 20 premises and still uses an email address carrying the earlier Trattoria C'Era Una Volta name. Its current public description explicitly defines the restaurant through seafood, fusion and traditional cooking, placing rare shellfish and crustaceans at the center of the concept. More than a simple change of name, Lobster & More represents a gradual culinary redirection of an established Brera trattoria, preserving recognizable Milanese dishes inside a restaurant now organized principally around the sea.
Galician sea urchin, oysters, raw seafood platters and paired fish carpacci establish the cold side of the current selection, with ponzu and wakame introducing acidity and salinity beyond conventional Italian crudo. Heat changes the emphasis through grilled calamari, gratinated oysters and fried soft-shell crab, followed by zucchini flowers filled with prawns and finished with teriyaki sauce. Pasta returns the cooking toward Italy: fresh tagliolini combine prawns and calamari, spaghetti pair clams with mullet bottarga, and ravioloni enclose scallops and prawns beneath tomato and basil. Lobster receives several distinct treatments, grilled, gratinated, Catalan-style or worked through spaghetti, making the crustacean promised by the restaurant's name a recurring ingredient. Curry prawns with pilaf rice and sesame-seared salmon with teriyaki push the selection eastward again, creating deliberate breaks from the Mediterranean sequence. Tarte Tatin, crema catalana and green-apple sorbet with Calvados close the meal through another geographic shift, completing a menu whose interest comes from movement between Italian seafood cooking and carefully chosen international references.
How to fold Trattoria Lobster & More into your trip.
Trattoria Lobster & More works as the meal within a Brera route connecting Milan's late-antique Christian architecture, Francesco Maria Richini's seventeenth-century institutional complex and the eighteenth-century palace that finally completed the Grande Brera project more than fifty years after Franco Russoli conceived it.
Begin at Basilica di San Simpliciano, whose late-fourth- to early-fifth-century fabric belongs to the earliest Christian architecture of Milan and whose original Basilica Virginum stood on the Roman route toward Como. Simpliciano, Ambrose's successor as bishop, became associated with the church after the relics of the Anaunian martyrs Sisinnio, Martirio and Alessandro arrived there; a Benedictine monastery developed beside it during the ninth century. Romanesque interventions altered the building between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and Ambrogio Bergognone later painted the great Coronation of the Virgin in the apse. Continue to Palazzo Brera, erected over the former Umiliati monastery after the Jesuits established their college on the site. Francesco Maria Richini gave the complex its present architectural direction during the seventeenth century; suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 transferred it to the state, and Maria Theresa of Austria concentrated the Accademia di Belle Arti, Biblioteca Braidense, astronomical observatory and botanical garden there. Giuseppe Piermarini completed the courtyard and entrance, where Antonio Canova's Napoleon as Mars entered in bronze in 1859. Conclude at Palazzo Citterio, an eighteenth-century residence acquired by the state in 1972 through Pinacoteca director Franco Russoli's plan to expand Brera's modern collections beyond the historic palace. James Stirling developed a major museum proposal during the 1980s, later work reshaped the underground areas, and Mario Cucinella directed the final 2024 installation before the palace opened that December with the Jesi and Vitali collections among its twentieth-century holdings. The progression moves from the late-antique fabric of San Simpliciano through Richini, Piermarini and Canova's centuries of work at Palazzo Brera into Russoli, Stirling and Cucinella's long pursuit of Palazzo Citterio, giving dinner on Via Palermo a route through more than sixteen centuries of Brera's architectural and artistic development.
Where your story begins.
Foresyte Travel reveals places that feel extraordinary long before you arrive.
Experience premium editorial crafted for luxury travelers.
