Why you should experience ZenMarket Japanese & Korean Food in Milan, Italy.
ZenMarket Japanese & Korean Food is a specialist Asian grocery where Lorenteggio's residential character, Japanese pantry culture, Korean food traditions and nearly two decades of specialist retail converge in a shop built around ingredients once difficult to find in Milan.
Set along Via Lorenteggio near Via Tolstoj and just steps from Piazza Bolivar, the store brings Japanese and Korean food culture into a neighborhood corridor west of Milan's historic center. Shelves move through rice, noodles, seaweed, sauces, spices, sweets and drinks before refrigerated and frozen sections introduce tofu, vegetables, kimchi, dumplings, fish and other ingredients requiring colder storage. An in-house kitchen deepens the visit through Japanese, Korean and broader Asian preparations ready to eat on site or take away, connecting packaged discovery with finished cooking in the same shop. The result is a specialist market where browsing, ingredient discovery and prepared food provide several routes into Japanese and Korean cooking within a single address.
What you should know about ZenMarket Japanese & Korean Food.
ZenMarket Japanese & Korean Food is best known for extending a Milan-based Asian food business begun online in 2008 into a specialist retail operation whose second physical chapter brought an in-house Japanese and Korean kitchen to Via Lorenteggio in 2025. Luca Chen established the ZenMarket web shop around food and household goods sourced across Japan, South Korea, China and Thailand, creating an early Italian online outlet for products that remained difficult to obtain through conventional grocery retail. The business subsequently developed a physical shop at Via Fezzan 4, concentrating particularly strongly on Japanese and Korean food while carrying cooking equipment such as rice cookers, takoyaki plates and steaming baskets alongside pantry ingredients. Its food selection grew around products including katsuobushi, panko, miso, curry, nori, dashi preparations, soba, gyoza, kamaboko, sake and fresh melonpan, giving home cooks access to components associated with specific Japanese preparations as well as packaged snacks. ZenMarket later expanded its reach through nationwide online ordering while the Via Fezzan shop maintained the physical side of the business. The 2025 arrival of ZenMarket 2 at Via Lorenteggio 25 marked a major change by combining the established grocery concept with an internal kitchen dedicated to Japanese, Korean and other Asian dishes. The new location broadened the refrigerated and frozen selection through Asian vegetables, tofu, dumplings, fish and prepared foods while preserving the Japanese-Korean specialization that had distinguished the earlier shop. Luca Chen's progression from a 2008 web shop through Via Fezzan and into the 2025 Lorenteggio grocery-and-kitchen concept gives ZenMarket Japanese & Korean Food an unusually long development within Milan's specialist Asian food scene.
Browsing ZenMarket Japanese & Korean Food becomes most rewarding when the shelves are approached through complete dishes, since individual ingredients begin connecting into the components of a Japanese or Korean meal. Katsuobushi, miso and seaweed open a route toward dashi and miso soup, while soba and udon shift attention toward noodle cooking through broths, sauces and toppings selected separately. Korean cooking develops through kimchi, tofu, rice, seaweed and refrigerated ingredients before soju and Korean drinks extend the selection beyond the kitchen. Frozen gyoza, bao and fish introduce faster preparations, while mochi, dorayaki, Pocky, Japanese KitKat varieties and fresh melonpan carry the progression toward sweets with markedly different textures. Cooking tools deepen the same process through rice cookers, takoyaki plates, steam baskets, chopsticks and tableware, allowing ingredients discovered on the shelves to connect with the equipment used to prepare and serve them. ZenMarket Japanese & Korean Food turns grocery shopping into a practical exploration of Asian cooking, moving from pantry foundations through refrigerated ingredients and cooking tools toward finished dishes assembled at home.
How to fold ZenMarket Japanese & Korean Food into your trip.
ZenMarket Japanese & Korean Food works as the culinary destination within a western Milan route connecting Visconti patronage, industrial architecture and Giorgio Armani's four decades of fashion design.
Begin at San Cristoforo sul Naviglio, where two adjoining churches preserve separate medieval building campaigns beside the Naviglio Grande, with the older Romanesque structure rebuilt in 1192 and substantially altered during the fourteenth century. Gian Galeazzo Visconti sponsored the adjoining Cappella Ducale after the plague of 1399, connecting the church with his dynasty through the Visconti biscione on its façade, while Ludovico il Moro came here in 1491 to meet Beatrice d'Este as she arrived from Ferrara for their marriage. Continue to Mudec, where David Chipperfield transformed buildings belonging to the former Ansaldo industrial complex into a museum that opened during Expo 2015. The project emerged from a 1999 initiative to create a cultural center within the former factory site, with Chipperfield placing the exhibition rooms around an opaque-glass central hall whose irregular geometry rises inside the surviving industrial perimeter. Conclude at Armani/Silos, opened by Giorgio Armani on April 30, 2015 to mark the fortieth anniversary of his career inside a 1950 granary measuring 4,500 square meters across four levels. Armani personally conceived the conversion and organized decades of his work around themes including androgynous tailoring, international influences and Hollywood, with Richard Gere's wardrobe from American Gigolo connecting the collection to the 1980 film that helped introduce Armani's tailoring to an international cinema audience. The progression moves from San Cristoforo sul Naviglio's medieval Visconti patronage through Mudec's conversion of the former Ansaldo works and Armani/Silos's passage from grain storage into a four-decade fashion archive before closing at ZenMarket Japanese & Korean Food for Japanese and Korean ingredients, prepared dishes and specialist food shopping.
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