Why you should experience Yoshinobu in Milan, Italy.
Yoshinobu is an exacting Japanese restaurant where Porta Nuova's polished urban character, Yoshinobu Kurio's sushi mastery, daily fish selection and restrained Japanese aesthetics converge around one of Milan's most accomplished sushi counters.
Set along Via Galileo Galilei near Via Marco Polo and just steps from Piazza della Repubblica, the restaurant occupies a composed pocket where nineteenth-century residential façades, tree-lined avenues and the rational geometry of twentieth-century Milan meet the towers rising through Porta Nuova. Two intimate rooms keep the encounter tightly focused, with the sushi counter placing Kurio's knife work directly before diners under warm light filtered through Japanese paper. Flowers personally selected by the chef introduce measured changes of color against the otherwise restrained interior. The result is a deeply personal Japanese dining room where architecture, counter ritual and Kurio's meticulous handling of fish concentrate attention on the craft unfolding across the meal.
What you should know about Yoshinobu.
Yoshinobu is best known for Yoshinobu Kurio's progression from Osaka through Germany and seven years at Nobu Milano into a restaurant that established him among the Japanese chefs who advanced serious sushi culture in Milan. Kurio entered independent restaurateurship in 2008 after his Nobu tenure, naming the restaurant from the first half of Yoshinobu and building its reputation around direct control of the fish entering his kitchen. His working day became closely associated with early visits to Milan's fish market, where he distinguishes farmed fish from net-caught and line-caught specimens before determining which selections merit service. That discipline created a changing market-driven component alongside the restaurant's established repertoire and brought species including bonito, turbot and brown meagre into a sushi program extending beyond familiar fish. Kurio's standing acquired formal recognition when Gambero Rosso awarded Yoshinobu Tre Bacchette, placing the restaurant among Italy's highest-rated sushi addresses. Gambero Rosso subsequently named Kurio a Maestro del Sushi, a career distinction honoring chefs who helped establish and transmit sushi culture in Italy. The restaurant entered another chapter when it moved from Via Giuseppe Parini to Via Galileo Galilei, where Gruppo Censeo developed a renovation around two rooms, the Japanese counter, paper-filtered lighting and the floral compositions Kurio continues to select himself. The 2025 Gambero Rosso Sushi selection retained Yoshinobu among Italy's Tre Bacchette restaurants and again placed Kurio among the Maestri del Sushi, extending an arc from Osaka and Nobu Milano through independent chef-patronage into national recognition for his contribution to Japanese cooking in Italy.
Nigiri provides the clearest measure of Kurio's approach, with slices cut broadly enough to cloak the rice beneath them and selections changing with the fish available to the kitchen. Toro brings the soft richness of tuna belly before turbot and sea bass move toward leaner textures, and sea-urchin nigiri introduces a colder, creamy concentration of marine flavor. Sashimi strips away the rice completely, sharpening attention on the cut and condition of fish such as amberjack, red shrimp and purple prawn. Tempura changes the progression through a fine fried coating around seasonal seafood, including moeche when available, before charcoal cooking brings collars and other fish cuts into a hotter, more concentrated register. Omakase places those decisions in Kurio's hands, allowing market selection, cut, temperature and cooking technique to determine the order from the counter. Yoshinobu makes the quality and treatment of fish the controlling principle of dinner, moving from pristine raw cuts through rice, frying and charcoal with the precision expected from a chef whose career has become inseparable from Milanese sushi.
How to fold Yoshinobu into your trip.
Yoshinobu works as the meal within a cultured Porta Venezia route tracing how aristocratic ambition, Napoleonic power and postwar reconstruction produced three radically different chapters of Milanese art and architecture around the eastern public gardens.
Begin at Palazzo Dugnani, where Giuseppe Casati transformed a comparatively modest Cavalchini residence after acquiring it in 1730, using architecture and painting to consolidate the prestige of a family newly elevated into Milanese nobility. Giambattista Tiepolo arrived during this campaign and completed the Stories of Scipio and Apotheosis of Scipio in 1731, an early triumph outside Venetian territory that joined contributions from artists including Ferdinando Porta, Carlo Innocenzo Carloni and Mattia Bortoloni; the Dugnani acquired the palace in 1753 and made it home to the Accademia dei Fenici from 1762, carrying aristocratic display into Milanese literary culture. Continue to Villa Reale, commissioned by Count Ludovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso from Leopoldo Pollack and built between 1790 and 1796 as one of Milanese Neoclassicism's major residential projects. Giuseppe Parini devised the iconographic program for its mythological exterior sculpture, Pollack developed the English-style garden with Ercole Silva, and the villa subsequently passed through French rule to Gioacchino Murat, Napoleon and Viceroy Eugène de Beauharnais before becoming the home of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in 1921, transforming an aristocratic residence into a major repository of nineteenth-century art. Conclude at PAC - Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, where the destruction of Villa Reale's stables during the 1943 bombing created the site for Ignazio Gardella's postwar experiment in museum architecture. Gardella won the commission in 1948 and opened the pavilion in 1954, organizing 1,200 square meters across three interrelated levels whose differing light conditions accommodated sculpture, painting and works on paper; the institution subsequently shifted fully toward temporary exhibitions in 1979. A mafia car bomb devastated the building on July 27, 1993 and killed five people, leading Gardella and his son Jacopo to reconstruct the pavilion according to its original architectural conception before its 1996 reopening. The progression moves from Tiepolo's eighteenth-century transformation of aristocratic ambition into painting through Pollack and Parini's Neoclassical synthesis of architecture, sculpture and garden design into Gardella's destruction and reconstruction of a postwar home for contemporary art, revealing three centuries of artistic patronage and architectural reinvention around Yoshinobu.
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