Bites – Milan's seventeen-seat laboratory for borderless cooking

On via Lambro, a quiet residential street just off the restaurant row of central Porta Venezia, Bites serves one of Milan's smallest dining rooms. The restaurant opened in 2019 and has kept reshaping itself ever since, true to a founding idea that nothing here should sit still for long. Its name describes the format precisely: a procession of small plates, bites, each one built from ingredients and techniques borrowed across cuisines without regard for where one culture's pantry ends and another's begins. Guests sit mostly along a counter that looks directly onto the kitchen, so the cooking itself becomes the conversation. The kitchen is currently led by chef Andrea Baita, with Camilla Cogliati running the small, constantly changing wine and sake list from the floor. Bites is Selected in the MICHELIN Guide.

01The room and the setting

Bites keeps to a strict seventeen covers, a number the restaurant states as a point of principle rather than a constraint on its own website. Of those seats, nine are arranged directly on the kitchen counter, with the remainder split across four small tables, giving the room an intimacy built for dialogue between kitchen, floor and guest rather than for anonymous dining.

The restaurant describes itself as simply furnished, a setting that puts the emphasis squarely on the plates arriving in front of diners rather than on decor. It sits in a part of Porta Venezia that stays quieter than the district's busier corners, a short walk from the area's nightlife but set apart from its flow.

02The chef

Bites was founded by two chefs born in 1995, Andrea Baita and Pietro Zamuner, who had worked together in the kitchens of Seta and 28 Posti before opening their own address on via Lambro. Zamuner's time at Fäviken in Sweden, together with travels through Asia, brought an omakase sensibility to the format, a willingness to let the kitchen set the pace of the meal rather than the menu card.

Insider tip

Close to the M1 Porta Venezia metro stop; booking recommended, especially for dinner.

Today the kitchen is led by Baita alone, a chef described as reserved at the stoves, letting his plates do the talking rather than explaining them tableside. He now works with sous-chef Samuele Cirillo, while Andrea Torresi and sommelier Camilla Cogliati run service and the cellar from the floor, turning every course into a short conversation about where it came from.

03The cooking

The kitchen cooks almost exclusively over charcoal, building flavour through fermentation, slow marination and French-style sauces rather than through showy technique. The result draws on French, Nordic and above all Japanese reference points, with ingredients handled for their acid, sweet and umami notes more than for visual spectacle.

No visit follows quite the same path twice. The kitchen treats repetition as the enemy, preferring to keep moving rather than settle into a fixed signature, which means the lineup of small plates shifts with the seasons and with what arrives at the counter that week.

04Wine and drinks

The cellar is deliberately small and in constant rotation, moving between wine, sake and non-alcoholic pairings rather than settling on a fixed list.

05The neighbourhood

Via Lambro sits inside Porta Venezia, one of Milan's liveliest districts after dark, yet the restaurant occupies a stretch that stays apart from the crowds heading to the area's bars. The M1 Porta Venezia metro stop is close by, making the short walk from the station one of the easiest approaches for an evening booking.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.