Altriménti – a Milanese reunion in the shadow of CityLife's towers

Altriménti sits on a glazed corner of Via Monte Bianco, in CityLife, the glass-towered district built on Milan's former fairground. It holds a place in the MICHELIN Guide as a Selected restaurant, cooking modern, seasonal Italian food in a register its own team calls deliberately unpretentious. The name, with its accented é, is a small manifesto: this is a restaurant that could have been just another one, but chose instead to be itself, because there is always an alternative. It opened in February 2019, a reunion project between chef Eugenio Boer and his longtime maître and sommelier Damian Piotr Janczara, backed by two regulars-turned-investors, Lorenzo Galletti and Leonardo Nardella, who could not bear to see their favourite table close for good. The pair had worked together before at Essenza, a restaurant that earned a Michelin star in 2017 before its own story ended; Altriménti is their second act, pitched as plainer, warmer, and closer to the neighbourhood. Fittingly, the same address has form: in 1998 it was the first bistro opened in Milan by chef Claudio Sadler.

01The room and the setting

The dining room is built around colour and paper rather than marble or velvet. Its own description runs to "Cucina italiana contemporanea, sala con 76 stampe di illustratori, carta dei vini di nicchia" – seventy-six prints by contemporary illustrators cover the walls across three connected rooms, which together seat up to sixty covers, "Sala elegante con 76 stampe di illustratori contemporanei, carta dei vini di nicchia, tre sale fino a 60 coperti." Early reviewers noted the deliberate theatre of the entrance, where a play of lighting sets off an audacious red on the walls before opening onto a calmer, lighter main room furnished in pale wood.

02The chef and the team

Eugenio Boer, the Italian-Ligurian-Dutch chef better known in Milan for his tasting-menu restaurant Bu:r, conceived Altriménti with Damian Piotr Janczara as a simpler, more everyday project than his main kitchen, built with the intention of offering a simpler, more essential alternative for people who want to enjoy well-made cooking and relax in a pleasant space. Day-to-day cooking has in the past been entrusted to chefs trained in serious Milanese kitchens: Marco Annunziata, who came through Andrea Berton's school and Pisacco, led the stoves in the restaurant's early years, "La guida della cucina è affidata a Marco Annunziata, proveniente dalla scuola di Andrea Berton e già sous-chef di Pisacco." More recently, a January 2025 review named Nicola Favanella as the chef running the kitchen, continuing the restaurant's line of cooking without technical flourish. Janczara, meanwhile, remains the constant at the front of house, the one guests remember as the restaurant's natural entertainer.

Insider tip

Open Tuesday–Saturday, lunch and dinner; closed Monday and Sunday.

03The cooking

Altriménti was built to avoid the predictable shape of an Italian menu. In its first years the carte dropped the usual antipasto–primo–secondo order entirely in favour of three loose categories, "Il menu evita la tradizionale ripartizione tra antipasti, primi e secondi per prediligere la catalogazione in base 'genere': carne, pesce, verdure." Boer has since described his own cooking temperament as slow-release, and diners have made the same observation about the food itself: it rewards patience rather than spectacle. More recent visits describe a return to a more classic menu structure, though the kitchen's instinct for vegetables – stewed carrot, goat's cheese mousse, taggiasca olives and hazelnuts was an early signature dish – has stayed consistent across the restaurant's different chefs.

04What to order

The current carte, as listed on the restaurant's menu in June 2025, runs through fresh pasta made in house: ravioli filled with nettle and ricotta, dressed with parmesan and leek from Cervere, and a saffron carnaroli risotto finished with gremolata and a reduced beef jus. A simpler, rustic register shows in a pasta e fagioli with cardoncelli mushrooms and oven-roasted datterini tomatoes. Vitello tonnato and filled fresh pasta have been repeat favourites across several years of guest reviews, alongside seafood dishes such as grilled prawns with lardo and a chickpea cream. Dessert has traditionally closed with a small pre-dessert in a starred-kitchen idiom, followed by simpler, playful sweets – a crème caramel with salted caramel popcorn was one early signature.

05When to go and booking

Altriménti serves lunch and dinner Tuesday to Saturday, from 12.45 for lunch and 19.30 for dinner, and is closed on Mondays and Sundays, according to the restaurant's own site in October 2026. The room is genuinely a neighbourhood fixture by now – one review called it an established point of reference for dining in CityLife rather than a passing opening.

06The neighbourhood

CityLife itself is the reason Altriménti exists where it does: a 36.6-hectare redevelopment of the old Fiera Milano fairground, its three towers designed respectively by Arata Isozaki, Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid Architects, with more than half the site given over to parkland. The restaurant sits a few minutes from the Amendola–Fiera stop on the M1 line and from Portello on the M5, close enough to the Arco della Pace to make an easy pre- or post-dinner walk, and only a short distance from CityLife's fountain and gardens.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.