Joia – Milan's pioneer of vegetarian haute cuisine

In a quiet stretch of Via Panfilo Castaldi, in Milan's Buenos Aires district, Joia has spent more than three decades proving that vegetarian cooking belongs at the top table of Italian gastronomy. Pietro Leemann opened the restaurant in 1989 on the grammar of Italian and French haute cuisine enriched with Asian technique, and in 1996 it became the first vegetarian restaurant in Europe to be awarded a MICHELIN star. The project long ago outgrew the status of novelty: chefs Sauro Ricci and Raffaele Minghini, who joined Leemann's kitchen in 2012 and took over ownership in 2024, now carry the idea forward under their own direction. Joia holds one MICHELIN Star, recognition not of a diet but of technique, discipline and a kitchen that treats vegetables, grains and legumes with the seriousness usually reserved for meat and fish.

01The room and the setting

Inside, the dining room favours restraint: clean lines, natural materials and lighting designed by Davide Groppi, calibrated to keep attention on the plate rather than the architecture around it. The atmosphere is deliberately quiet and intimate, conceived to encourage listening as much as eating, with a curated soundtrack following the rhythm of the meal rather than filling the silence around it.

The restaurant sits in Milan's Buenos Aires district, a residential pocket of the city a short walk from the shopping boulevard that gives the quarter its name, set apart from the noise of the centre while staying within easy reach of it.

02The chefs

Sauro Ricci and Raffaele Minghini met at Joia in 2012 and have run it together, as owners, since 2024. Ricci trained at the hospitality school in Spoleto before working from 2001 under Antonio Guida, Michelino Gioia and Stefano di Salvo at Il Pellicano, then studied ethno-anthropology at the University of Siena, graduating in 2010 with a thesis on the philosophy of modern macrobiotics.

Insider tip

Closed Monday and Sunday; booking advised for dinner service.

Minghini came to the kitchen by a different route: a degree in ethical and aesthetic philosophy from the University of Bologna, work in the osterias of Romagna from 2011, and three years from 2016 as head chef of Farmacy, a plant-based restaurant in London. Both became Leemann's deputies in the kitchen from 2014, and when he left in early 2024 to found a community project in the Swiss ecovillage of Bordei, in the Centovalli Alps, he handed them the restaurant.

03The cooking

The kitchen's founding premise is non-violence: no meat or fish, and in practice little egg, on the idea that animal ingredients carry what the restaurant calls the energetic weight of their own production. In its place is produce chosen for organic certification, seasonality and, wherever possible, growers from Milan and Lombardy — a commitment that helped make Joia one of the first restaurants to receive the Michelin Green Star for sustainable cuisine, in 2020.

Two tasting menus run through service, rewritten with the seasons: two versions each for summer and winter, one apiece for spring and autumn. The house method is reversed from the usual kitchen order — dishes are conceived first, as ideas, and only afterwards cooked into form, a process the chefs trace to philosophy as much as to technique.

04What to order

The autumn 2026 menus, La scoperta della tradizione and L'enfasi della natura, each run to six courses before dessert, priced at €140 as read on the restaurant's own site in October 2026. Among the dishes: Porto del sole, a savoury tatin of Delica pumpkin in three guises with a lemongrass-scented Satsuma mandarin sauce; Ombelico del mondo, a vegetable risotto creamed with herbs, chestnuts and flame-grilled Milanese pleurotus mushrooms; and Karuna, an amber vegetable broth with a tortello filled with mushroom duxelles.

To finish, Grembo d'oro reinvents a soft egg as panna cotta made with mountain milk and Madagascan vanilla, its yolk replaced by redcurrant and served with mango and lassi. At lunch, Tuesday to Friday, the choice narrows to Tre Piatti a Mezzogiorno, a three-course digest of the tasting menus, or the single-plate Piatto Quadro, composed differently each day.

05When to go and booking

Joia is closed on Mondays and Sundays; Tuesday to Friday it opens for lunch from 12:30 to 14:00 and dinner from 19:30 to 21:30, with Saturday lunch service shortened to 12:30-13:30 and the same dinner hours. Reservations are advisable for dinner, by telephone or through the restaurant's own site; both tasting menus can be adapted to an entirely plant-based or gluten-free version on request.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.