Why you should experience Vasiliki Kouzina in Milan, Italy.
Vasiliki Kouzina is a contemporary Greek restaurant where Porta Romana's residential streets, Vasiliki Pierrakea's Kalamata upbringing, her transition from Milanese management into hospitality and a deeply regional view of Hellenic cooking converge through one of the city's most ambitious explorations of modern Greece.
Set along Via Clusone near Viale Monte Nero and the streets leading toward Porta Romana, the restaurant occupies a quieter residential pocket where early-twentieth-century apartment façades, neighborhood restaurants and small commercial premises sit beyond the denser avenues of the inner city. Red walls derived from Pierrakea's first Italian kitchen meet forest-green velvet, handcrafted brass tables and lamps, Luisa Bertoldo ceramics shaped like waves and a chandelier depicting Karagiozis, giving the rooms references extending from Byzantine color to Cycladic seas and Greek shadow theater. The cooking reaches beyond familiar taverna staples through regional recipes, indigenous grape varieties, small Greek producers and combinations spanning the Peloponnese, Corfu, Macedonia, Santorini and northern Greece. The result is a highly personal Porta Romana restaurant where Pierrakea treats food, wine, decorative arts and hospitality as complementary routes into the breadth of Greek culture.
What you should know about Vasiliki Kouzina.
Vasiliki Kouzina is best known for Vasiliki Pierrakea's progression from a Kalamata family steeped in agriculture and hospitality into a Milan restaurant project dedicated to regional Greek cooking. Her grandfather Anastassis produced wine and olive oil and ran a traditional trattoria, and her mother cooked professionally; Pierrakea initially chose a different path, studying at the University of Patras before arriving in Milan in February 2005 and completing a Bocconi master in management for public, nonprofit and international organizations. She subsequently worked in marketing and real estate, then returned professionally to food in 2013 through catering and private-chef work before establishing Vasiliki Kouzina in April 2016. Gikas Xenakis later joined as gastronomic consultant and supervisor after Pierrakea's initial period in the kitchen, and Nicola Cinus now leads daily cooking as Pierrakea concentrates on the dining room and the entirely Greek wine program. Her continuing management career developed alongside the restaurant: she became a member of Terziario Donna's governing council in 2023 and serves as a vice president of Fondazione Fiera Milano representing commerce and services through Confcommercio Milano, Lodi, Monza e Brianza. Luisa Vanzo and Luca Vitali of Officina Antiquaria designed Vasiliki Kouzina around Byzantine references, and Caraiba Luxury developed its table setting, adding named practitioners to a project Pierrakea conceived as cultural as well as culinary. In 2024 she expanded across Via Clusone with Vasiliki Kantina & Gastronomia, a wine bar and delicatessen centered on 150 Greek labels, giving the original restaurant a companion operation devoted to the producers and wines she has spent years selecting across Greece.
The current tasting menu begins with roasted pumpkin, graviera cream, apple glaze and pumpkin granola before Mosxaraki Hünkar pairs beef tartare with soft aubergine and smoked yogurt. Corfu couscous brings the day's fish together with roasted peppers, then slowly cooked lamb introduces roasted giant beans, Memmos feta and cumin sauce. Kakavia draws on the Greek fishermen's soup through sea bass, squid and abundant dill, and roasted calamari uses Kozani saffron in a roasted-potato sauce with parsley oil. Patzarosalata moves beetroot toward wild rocket, almond-garlic sauce and a potato-free interpretation of skordalia, extending familiar Greek preparations through substantially altered composition. Pierrakea personally curates the wine selection around indigenous Greek grapes, with Assyrtiko, Moschofilero, Xinomavro, Roditis, Robola, Limnio, Mavrodafni and Negoska represented through estates stretching from Santorini and Kefalonia to Macedonia, Thrace and the Peloponnese. Chocolate with rosemary cream, crisp almond granules and lemon sorbet closes the tasting sequence through bitter cocoa, herbs, nuts and citrus, completing a menu that moves across regional traditions without reducing contemporary Greek cooking to its most familiar exports.
How to fold Vasiliki Kouzina into your trip.
Vasiliki Kouzina works as the meal within a Porta Romana route connecting an eighteenth-century burial complex created for the Ospedale Maggiore, Alberto Migliorini's surviving pavilion from Milan's former wholesale market and a Renaissance church developed through Giovanni Battagio, Cristoforo Lombardo and Martino Bassi.
Begin at Rotonda della Besana, whose origins reach the Ospedale Maggiore's need for additional burial ground in 1695 before San Michele ai Nuovi Sepolcri and its enclosing portico produced the late-Baroque complex visible today. Francesco Croce, Attilio Arrigoni and Francesco Raffagno shaped its architectural development, and the enclosure eventually held the remains of 150,000 people; Napoleonic Milan later considered converting it into a Pantheon before the site passed through uses including barracks and hospital functions and entered municipal ownership. Continue to Palazzina Liberty, designed by Alberto Migliorini in 1908 as the café-restaurant and commercial meeting point of the Verziere wholesale market. The surrounding glass-and-iron market structures disappeared after operations moved in 1965, but Luigi Caccia Dominioni preserved the pavilion within the park inaugurated in 1969; Dario Fo and Franca Rame's La Comune occupied it from 1974, converting the former merchants' meeting place into a center for theater, performance and political culture. Conclude at Santa Maria della Passione, begun during the final decades of the fifteenth century after Gian Galeazzo Sforza committed the Lateran Canons to constructing a church and monastery in 1485 on land connected with Daniele Birago. Giovanni Battagio devised its original centralized conception, Cristoforo Lombardo advanced the building and Martino Bassi later expanded it, producing successive Renaissance interventions around a religious foundation established under Sforza patronage. The progression moves from Croce and his collaborators' architecture for the Ospedale Maggiore dead through Migliorini, Caccia Dominioni, Fo and Rame's successive reinventions of the former Verziere pavilion into Battagio, Lombardo and Bassi's Renaissance church, tracing burial culture, commerce, theater and religious patronage across Porta Romana.
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