Andrea Aprea – two stars rising above Milan's Etruscan rooms

On the top floor of the Fondazione Luigi Rovati, a nineteenth-century palazzo on Corso Venezia that doubles as one of Milan's most refined small museums of Etruscan art, chef Andrea Aprea runs the solo project that has defined his career. It holds Two MICHELIN Stars, for a kitchen that treats Neapolitan childhood memory as a serious technical subject rather than nostalgia: the restaurant's historic egg in Purgatory sees a low-temperature egg set on a sauce of tomato, onion and egg, wrapped in bread foam beneath a crisp bread wafer. Aprea, born in Naples in 1977 into a family of restaurateurs, trained through London, Asia and the Amalfi Coast before taking Park Hyatt Milan's VUN to the first MICHELIN Star ever awarded to a hotel restaurant in the city, in 2012, and a second in 2017. In 2022 he left the hotel world to open this restaurant under his own name, on a floor restored to certified sustainability standards and given over entirely to his cooking.

01The room and the setting

The restaurant was designed by Flaviano Capriotti Architetti and built between 2019 and 2022. It covers 400 square metres, split between a 210 square-metre dining room, private dining room, cellar and entrance hall, and a 190 square-metre kitchen left entirely open to view, with eight tables seating thirty-six guests in all.

A circular chandelier in Murano glass and gold leaf, designed by Capriotti and made by Barovier & Toso using the antique "rugiada" technique, marks the centre of the room. The walls are clad in black bucchero-style ceramic, a direct nod to the Etruscan vases held in the museum below, while a panoramic window opens onto the park of Porta Venezia and the city's skyline beyond.

Site-specific works by artists Andrea Sala and Mauro Ceolin run through the space, continuing the dialogue between the dining room and the Foundation's collection one floor down.

02The chef

Andrea Aprea was born in Naples in 1977 to a family already in the restaurant trade. His training took him through some of the most demanding kitchens abroad, including London's Waterside Inn, before spells in Kuala Lumpur, at Palazzo Sasso on the Amalfi Coast, at Villa San Michele in Florence and back in Naples at Il Comandante inside Hotel Romeo.

Insider tip

Closed for summer 9–31 August; ground-floor Caffè Bistrot serves breakfast to dinner daily.

In Milan he became executive chef of VUN at the Park Hyatt, a post he held from 2011 to 2021, winning the first MICHELIN Star ever given to a Milanese hotel restaurant in 2012 and a second in 2017. In 2022 he stepped out on his own, opening the Fondazione Luigi Rovati restaurant as chef-patron and regaining his second star within two years of opening.

03The cooking

Three tasting menus run through the room: Contemporaneità, four courses built around Aprea's newest ideas and often featuring pigeon; Partenope, a six-course route through Campania that has included a beef tortello alla genovese with escarole, provolone del Monaco and black olives; and Signature, eight dishes each dated to the year Aprea first cooked them, among them a 2016 strawberry in maraschino with mascarpone and nepetella.

Running through all three is the same idea: memory as working material rather than sentiment, reworking dishes from Aprea's Neapolitan childhood with the techniques he gathered in London, Asia and along the Amalfi coast.

04What to order

Signature plates recur across the menus: the foil-baked potato dressed in the style of an amatriciana, the Ri-sotto marino built on seafood extraction, a cuttlefish alla diavola served in chicken broth, and a black spaghetto alla Luciana finished with celery and lemon. Turbot alla Mugnaia and a quail dish with cauliflower, coffee, sea urchin and black truffle also appear among the kitchen's long-standing favourites.

To finish, small babà and a vanilla dessert built with whisky and dates close many of the tasting menus.

05Wine and drinks

The cellar holds around 650 labels gathered from major houses and small growers across the world's wine regions, giving the sommelier team room to pair each tasting menu by the glass or build a fuller journey through it.

06The neighbourhood

The restaurant sits in Porta Venezia, opposite the Planetarium and close to the public gardens on Via Palestro, in a palazzo whose ground floor hides a second address: the Caffè Bistrot, a 135 square-metre room opening onto a secret green courtyard, serving Italian classics from breakfast through dinner in a space built to recall Milan's bourgeois cafés of the early twentieth century.

As of October 2026, the restaurant's own website lists a summer closure from 9 to 31 August.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.