IYO – the sushi counter that gave Italy its first Japanese star

IYO opened in Via Piero della Francesca in 2007, the creation of Claudio Liu, who was only twenty-four at the time. Born in China in 1982 and raised in Correggio, in Emilia, Liu had moved to Milan with his family in 2003 before opening IYO at twenty-four, a venture that would become a turning point for Asian dining in Italy. The restaurant holds One MICHELIN Star, a distinction it has carried since 2015, when it became the first Japanese restaurant in Italy to receive the honour. Sushi still anchors the room, served from a counter that has become one of the city's quiet landmarks, but a 2024 renovation added a robata grill for live-fire cooking and a dedicated steam kitchen, broadening a menu built on the idea that Japanese technique and Italian produce, service and mood belong together. Run today by chefs working in step — Simone Tricarico, Katsumi Soga and pastry chef Luca De Santi — IYO remains the flagship of a small group that has since spread from Porta Nuova to the Sardinian coast.

01The room and the setting

A major renovation closed the original dining room for months in 2024; through the works, service continued without interruption from a temporary address in Piazza Alvar Aalto, a stopgap Claudio Liu has since held up as proof that a kitchen's rhythm can survive a building site. IYO reopened with a robata counter for cooking over open flame in full view of the room, joining the original sushi bar, alongside a new section dedicated to steamed dishes.

Behind the pass, the kitchen gained larger preparation areas and two new laboratories — one devoted to pastry, the other to butchering fish — built to support a wider repertoire without diluting the sushi counter that built the restaurant's name. At the front of house, a cocktail bar now runs its own list alongside the dining room, built on sake, yuzu and wasabi rather than standard spirits alone.

02The chef

The current menu was shaped jointly by executive chef Simone Tricarico together with Katsumi Soga and pastry chef Luca De Santi, built on what the kitchen calls an apparent simplicity, in which technique and presentation exist to show off the ingredient rather than disguise it. Tricarico arrived with a CV built across the kitchens of Alain Ducasse, Alain Roux, Michel Bras, Pascal Barbot, Seiji Yamamoto and Giancarlo Perbellini, a background in French and Japanese fine dining that now feeds directly into IYO's hybrid repertoire.

Insider tip

Closed for lunch Monday and Tuesday; both tasting menus are served for the whole table only.

Soga, who runs the sushi counter, was born in 1975 in Shizuoka prefecture on the slopes of Mount Fuji, trained in Japan, moved to Italy in 2006 and joined IYO Group in 2020, taking charge of the kitchen and sushi bar at IYO.

03The cooking

IYO describes its own menu as a journey in constant transformation, where the most innovative sushi and contemporary Japanese cooking are meant to meet in harmony rather than compete course by course. Two tasting menus run side by side: Faccio IYO 2026, built from the kitchen's newest work, and a Classico menu assembled from dishes that trace nineteen years of the restaurant's history — both written to be ordered for the whole table, and, given their complexity, not adapted for allergies or intolerances.

04What to order

The Faccio IYO 2026 menu (€158) opens with seared scallops and red Mazara prawn with persimmon, salmon roe, tonyu sauce and fennel oil, moves through baby squid with celeriac and chanterelles, a course called the four shades of eel, a six-piece daily nigiri selection, soba in dashi broth with seared mackerel, Patagonian sea bass tatsuta-age, and marinated Iberian pluma with negimiso and bergamot oil, before dessert.

The Classico menu (€148) draws on the restaurant's history: salmon carpaccio in kimizu sauce, seared and marinated tuna with wasabi, seared tuna belly with karashi sumiso and caviar, red prawns in sesame-yuzu oil, hand-cut raw squid with quail egg and caviar, a chef's sushi selection, the Wagyu burger with A5 Japanese beef and truffle mayonnaise, and a chicken-broth ramen with marinated egg and chashu. The same Wagyu burger, alongside edamame and a crispy soy-battered egg, sits on the à la carte list for guests who want a single dish rather than the full sequence.

05Wine and drinks

Either tasting menu can be matched with a wine pairing at €80 per person, and extended further with a supplement of A5 Japanese wagyu sirloin at €35. At the bar, ten signature cocktails run €18–20, built on Japanese ingredients — sake with clarified tomato water in one, gin with marinated lotus root in another, yuzu sake and raspberry with champagne in a third — alongside a full non-alcoholic list at €15.

06When to go and booking

As read on IYO's own site in October 2026, the kitchen runs Wednesday to Sunday for both lunch (12:30–14:00) and dinner (19:00–23:30); Monday and Tuesday evenings reopened that same month, leaving the week closed only for Monday and Tuesday lunch service. Wednesday to Friday lunch also brings a bento box menu in six versions — sushi, sashimi, uramaki, meat, cooked fish and vegetarian.

The restaurant sits in zona Sempione, the historic address where the IYO project began, a short walk from the Arco della Pace and Corso Sempione; the nearest stop is metro line M5, at Gerusalemme or Domodossola.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.