The Milan dining scene

Typical dishes in Milanese cuisine

Milan is the industrial powerhouse of Italy, drawing a mix of international businessmen, fashion designers, media moguls, and tourists by the busload. Milan's industry has also long been a major draw for inter-Italian emigration, so it's no surprise that Milanese restaurants serve a medley of cuisine from across Italy's regions: Apulia's sun-drenched Mediterranean south, Tuscany's vine-draped arcadia in the heartland, Gallic Piemonte hard up against the French Alps.

Reid's Milan Restaurants
Trattoria da Pino [light]
Luini [snack]
L'Osteria Grand Hotel [meal]
Latteria di San Marco [meal]
Trattoria Aurora [meal]
Il Luogo di Aimo e Nadia [meal]

Still, most restaurants are built atop a solid foundation of typical Milanese dishes and the cuisine popular in surrounding Lombardy, where the breadbasket plains of the wide Po Valley wash up against the lower slopes of the Alps in Italy's lake district. Lombardy's cooking mixes of lake and river fish, mountain cheeses, and the legacy of the barbarian hordes who settled here after the 5th-century fall of Rome.

Typical Milanese dishes

The Lombards are descended from Germanic, not Latin, stock, so it's no surprise the local signature dish is cotoletta alla milanese, that flattened, breaded veal cutlet more commonly known as wienerschnitzle.

Dining for free in Milan
Want a free dinner in Milan—or at least a hearty snack to stave off hunger until dinner? Do a stuzzichini (snacks) crawl from bar to cafe during the aperitivo /Happy Hour for tons of free bar snacks and scrumptious canapés. Full story Saffron-tinged risotto alla milanese is made with small, pearly grains of arborio rice, slow-cooked in broth to sticky perfection. Often, a bright yellow dollop of this rice appears on the plate next to a hearty slab of ossobuco, a beef shank served with the circle of marrow-rich bone still imbedded in the meat.

Tortelli di zucca, the pasta pockets stuffed with a spiced pumpkin paste typical of nearby Mantova, often show up on Milanese menus.

Cassoeûla is, as it sounds, a Milanese version of cassoulet, a stew-thick, cabbage-based soup fortified with meaty chunks of pork chop and sausage.

Many meals feature Northern Italy's signature side dish, polenta, a cornmeal mush that can range from a runny soup to a spackle-thick paste, sometimes cut into bars and lightly fried, sometimes studded with bits of mushroom or other fresh ingredients.

Bread and Cover
There's an unavoidable charge called pane e coperto ("bread and cover") of about €1 to €5 that's added onto your bill at just about all Florentine restaurants. This is not a scam. This is standard in Italy. With the famed Italian lakes (Como, Garda, Maggiore, and many smaller ones) reaching their deep fingers of water into the Alps just north of Milan, and the Mincio River lying to the east, Milan's restaurants are spoilt for fresh fish. To increase the likelihood that you're getting local products, look for the following fishies: persico (perch), trota (trout), lavarevllo and coregone (both forms of whitefish from the lakes), luccio (pike), or tinca (tench).

Cheese & desserts

Lombardy is the proud home of pungent, blue-veined Gorgonzola cheese, as well as its less famous—but just as wonderfully stinky—cousin from nearby Bergamo, the gooey, mold-less taleggio. Grana padana is the local sharp, hard, aged cheese that can hold its own against any parmesan or pecorino romano.

Lombardy also produces the widely exported Bel Paese (the sort of mild, everyman cheese you could throw into a kid's lunch box) as well as marscarpone, so soupy and spreadable that many people mistake it for some kind of heavy cream (understandable, as it's the prime ingredient in such heavenly, creamy desserts as zuppa inglese and tiramisù).

Speaking of dessert, Milan may not win too many awards in this department, and the sweets on its menus tend to hail from other parts of Italy, but we can blame the locals for having invented panettone, a sweet bread studded with bits of candied fruit—the traditional Christmastime dessert (though in its defense, panettone is far, far more palatable than its fruitcake cousins around the world).

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This material was last updated December 2010. All information was accurate at the time.

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