New Restaurants in Milan to Know in 2026
A late table on Montenapoleone, the lift doors opening onto a terrace with the rooftops below; across town, a ground-floor room in a public-housing block where the wine keeps coming and nobody seems to be leaving. Milan opens in those two registers at once — the grand arrival with a famous name attached, and the quieter current running through the east of the city, where a former bakery becomes the room everyone wants a seat in. Both have been busy across 2025 and into 2026.
These are the openings that have settled into themselves and are actually worth rearranging a night around, grouped roughly by where they sit and what kind of evening they suit.
The Quadrilatero goes all in
Walk the length of the luxury shopping streets now and you pass as many dining rooms as windows of clothes — and the centre of it all is Palazzo Fendi.
A terrace over the rooftops and the group's first proper cocktail bar: Langosteria Montenapoleone (Quadrilatero, opened November 2025) sets the seafood-luxe group's new flagship across the top floors of the palazzo. It is exactly as polished as that sounds, and the kitchen is the same one that built Langosteria's reputation in the first place.
Three walnut counters wrapped around an open kitchen, upstairs in the same building: Pepe (Quadrilatero, opened February 2026) is the more interesting story. It marks the return of chef Luca Fantin to Italy after fifteen years running one of Tokyo's best Italian kitchens. The counter-led room — those walnut counters, chef's tables, dishes meant to be shared — aims at contemporary Italian cooking that is precise without being precious.
A few streets away, behind the doors of the new Carlton Milan, Spiga (Quadrilatero, opened November 2025) is the fine-dining room of the Rocco Forte hotel. Fulvio Pierangelini shapes the menu as the group's food director, with his longtime collaborator Gigi Nastri running the line day to day. The cooking leans on Pierangelini's familiar idea of conscious simplicity — fewer elements, treated seriously.
A new star in the north-west
A former brush factory on Via Varesina, in the Certosa District, now holds just eight tables: this is Abba, the room of chef Fabio Abbattista — born in 1997, from Molfetta in Puglia, trained between London and a run of Italy's best kitchens. Not every breakthrough this year happened downtown.
The room itself opened in 2024, but it earned its first Michelin star in November 2025, which is the honest reason it belongs here: 2025 was the year it arrived. Expect Nordic-leaning restraint — natural light, plenty of space between tables, an open kitchen — and cooking built on essentiality rather than show.
The east of the city, in a lower key
East of the centre, around Porta Venezia and the streets running toward Porta Vittoria, the lights stay on late in small rooms that each do one thing with conviction. This is where the more telling movement is happening.
The best seats at Kiwon (Porta Venezia, opened October 2025) face the open kitchen, where a short, ferment-forward menu comes out a few plates at a time. This Korean small-plates bistro and wine bar on Via Melloni was opened by Carmine Colucci, chef Haneul Cielo Ko — whose family has run a Korean restaurant in the city for forty years — and Emanuele Romanelli, and the wine list is the point as much as the food.
The name means "home" in Tagalog, and Balay (Porta Venezia, opened July 2025) is built to feel like one — the same instinct as Kiwon, from a different direction. The Italian-Filipino chef Ray Ibarra, who spent six years at Bentoteca, has made a wine and tapas bar that draws on the Philippines' layered gastronomy — Chinese, Spanish, American influences all folded in.
There is a DJ booth in the corner, but Fiorin Fiorello (Porta Vittoria, opened late 2025) — set in a public-housing building on Via Fratelli Bronzetti — refuses to call itself a listening bar. What it is: a neighbourhood wine bar with more than three hundred labels, a kitchen that changes often, and a crowd that stays late. It captures the particular Milan habit of letting a first drink slide into a whole evening.
And a trattoria that changed hands
In the space that once held the fine-dining Uovodiseppia, something warmer has moved in: Donna Concetta (Porta Venezia, opened September 2025) is worth knowing, too. Chef Federico Della Vecchia named it for his grandmother and cooks from his Ischia roots — a trattoria that is classic in spirit and contemporary in execution, with a focused menu drawn from the sea and land of Campania.
How to keep up
A list like this is accurate the week it is written and slowly drifts after. The point of Better Taste is that the Milan catalogue is curated and kept current, so you carry the whole edit in your pocket rather than bookmarking a post — filter it by neighbourhood or by the kind of evening you want, and save the rooms you mean to get to.
Start with the openings above, then browse the rest of the city.