Don Carlos

The Restaurant

Don Carlos occupies the gourmet restaurant of the Grand Hotel et de Milan at Via Manzoni 29, in the Quadrilatero della Moda, four hundred metres from La Scala and across the avenue from Via Montenapoleone — the most-storied fashion address in the city. The Grand Hotel et de Milan, founded in 1863 and a Leading Hotels of the World property, was Giuseppe Verdi's Milan home for twenty-seven years, and the dining room is named for the composer's opera Don Carlo, with the walls hung with portraits, costume sketches, and stage scenes from La Scala's museum archive. The dining floor seats sixty across a long banquette down one side of the room, a row of round tables in the centre, and an alcove of two-tops along the candlelit back wall, all under low ambient lighting that registers as a deliberate stage set rather than a hotel restaurant default.

The kitchen — under executive chef Mauro Moia with consulting input from multi-Michelin-star chef Gennaro Esposito of Torre del Saracino — runs a Milanese-Italian carte with a deliberate Mediterranean inflection that distinguishes it from the rest of the Quadrilatero's hotel dining rooms. Signature plates have included a tortelli of buffalo ricotta and lemon with brown butter and aged Parmigiano; a saffron-and-osso-buco risotto alla Milanese (the room's reference Milanese plate); a black-cod with caponata and sicilian olive crumble; a Piemontese fassone tartare with quail egg, capers, and crispy bread; and the kitchen's reference dessert — a tiramisu with Marsala-zabaglione and crispy savoiardi that closes most evenings. The wine list runs about four hundred labels with deliberate Piemonte, Tuscan, and Champagne depth, and the by-the-glass programme rotates weekly.

Service is the older Italian formal school — captain-led, a sommelier round on every course, the by-the-glass narrated in detail, low-key opera recordings selected to the room — and the kitchen runs a full late service after La Scala's curtain falls, one of the few Milan rooms that does. The dining floor empties around the 10:30pm second seating with the post-opera audience streaming in from the four-hundred-metre walk down Via Verdi, and the kitchen's pace through that service is the room's working credential. For a Milan evening tied to La Scala — a post-opera dinner, a fashion-week client dinner, an anniversary or a proposal — Don Carlos is the city's standing answer.