Pellegrino 25

Pellegrino 25 sits in the Navigli — the canal district that Milan's creative and design community has inhabited for decades — in a space that carries the neighbourhood's industrial-converted-to-elegant aesthetic without making it a cliché. The restaurant's Michelin star arrived in November 2025, ratifying what the city's food community had recognised in the months since opening: a kitchen with genuine ambition operating in a room designed to support serious dining.

The cooking is contemporary Italian in the specific sense that the phrase has acquired meaning — not an imitation of classical Italian cuisine updated for the contemporary moment, but an original cuisine rooted in Italian ingredients and sensibility that uses modern technique to reveal rather than disguise. The menu changes with the season and the kitchen's evolving convictions, maintaining the fundamental Italian commitment to ingredient quality as the primary measure of the dish's success.

The dining room has the warm intimacy of the Navigli at its best: brick and plaster, candlelight, enough space between tables that the room feels generous rather than crowded. The service is young and informed, with the particular enthusiasm of a team working in a restaurant at the moment of its greatest recognition. The wine list focuses on Italian producers with a particular emphasis on northern Italian bottles.

For a meal in Milan that demonstrates knowledge of the city's current dining landscape rather than its established hierarchy, Pellegrino 25 is the table that makes the argument most clearly. The Navigli address, the recent star, and the quality of the cooking combine to produce a dinner that leaves a lasting impression without the formality of Milan's established luxury institutions.

Impressing clients in Milan often means taking them somewhere that demonstrates fluency with the city's current food culture rather than its history. Pellegrino 25 signals exactly that — a first star earned through genuine quality rather than institutional longevity, in a neighbourhood that has energy without the tourist premium of the Duomo district.

The tasting menu is the correct format. The pasta course — typically a precisely constructed filled or long pasta with a sauce demonstrating the chef's French-Italian technical synthesis — is the dish that most clearly states the kitchen's identity. The northern Italian wine selection rewards asking the sommelier for their current enthusiasm.