Motelombroso – a canal‑keeper's cottage turned kitchen of invention

On the towpath of the Naviglio Pavese, close to where Milan's canal network starts to feel more like countryside than city, Motelombroso occupies a pale pink casa cantoniera — a cottage once used to house road and waterway maintenance workers. Alessandra Straccamore and Matteo Mazza fell for the empty building and spent months restoring it, uncovering old frescoes along the way, before opening a restaurant built around three words: Cibo, Vino, Otium — food, wine, idleness. That sense of suspended time still defines the place: a glazed greenhouse dining room beside a garden thick with bamboo, where guests are as likely to be lying on the lawn with an unusual glass of wine as sitting down to a tasting menu. The kitchen is now led by chef Nicola Bonora, whose modern, creative cooking of land and sea has made Motelombroso one of the more personal addresses on this side of the city. It is selected in the MICHELIN Guide, recognised for cuisine as inventive as the house that contains it.

01The room and the setting

The building itself is the first surprise: a road worker's house, pale pink, standing where the Naviglio Pavese starts to thin out towards the countryside. Restoring it, the owners found a pale pink canal-keeper's cottage that, among other surprises, revealed old frescoes once the walls were stripped back. The kitchen now sits behind glass in what was once a gap between the historic buildings, a glazed green house built into the gap between the old structures that lets diners watch the pass while they eat.

Beyond the dining room, the garden is where the 'otium' of the name actually happens: a dim, leafy courtyard with a wonderful stand of bamboo for shade. The dining room itself stays small and intimate — a large glass wall onto an open kitchen, a bar with mirror and light effects, a handful of sofas, and a dining room that looks onto a small, carefully tended courtyard through a big window — which keeps the experience close and conversational rather than grand.

02The chef

Nicola Bonora took over the stoves after Andrea Zazzara, who had cooked alongside Matias Perdomo before opening his own 28 Posti; Bonora is the most recent chef at Motelombroso, and his résumé includes time at Gordon Ramsay's restaurant at the Forte Village in his native Sardinia, in Milan alongside Enrico Bartolini, and at the fusion restaurant Serica, where he worked on fermentation and extraction. That last stop shows in a style that treats sauces and textures as seriously as the protein itself.

Insider tip

Closed Mondays; dinner-only Tuesday to Friday; lunch service Saturday and Sunday.

The cooking is not quite a one-man show. Ideas pass between Mazza, sommelier Nicolò Scaglione, Alessandra Straccamore and Bonora himself, who proposes recipes that the team then works on together until a dish convinces everyone — a working method that keeps the menu restless rather than fixed to a single signature.

03The cooking

Bonora's main structure is a project he calls Habitat: two tasting menus of seven and nine courses, plus a monthly Habitat menu that explores twelve different gastronomic habitats across a year, though the scheme bends to season and instinct rather than staying rigid. On that menu, wild boar arrived shredded and almost earthy, doused in a honeyed sauce of boar's blood and a dusting of pine ash, while grouper was matured in guinea-fowl fat and finished with a butter-and-sage pil pil, and a reduced ragù brought together venison, pheasant, wood pigeon and grey partridge with boiled vegetables.

At other times of year the kitchen runs two parallel menus instead: one set to the songs of 1960s Italian and French classics, the other, Avant Garde, built around the same repertoire taken apart.

04What to order

On the Avant Garde route, the kitchen's best-known trick is a rebuilt tortellino: tortellino in cream and ham, classic already reworked in other Milanese kitchens, but here turned over again — whipped cream scented with gentian, the filling reduced to a powder like grated cheese, and a broth soaking the base of the plate. Elsewhere on that menu come a consommé of duck, capon and hen with a Capovilla apple distillate, a sea salad, an onion soup, sole meunière, and duck served two ways with its neck, closing on a fillet with green peppercorn.

On the regular menu, diners keep coming back for a shortlist of dishes: a welcome appetiser, a lobster roll, rice chips served with the aperitivo, saffron risotto and the house maritozzo — the savoury-bun dessert that has been part of the kitchen's identity since its earliest days, when the filling ran from lobster to slow-cooked sheep.

05Wine and drinks

The cellar is built to be explored rather than skimmed: a wine list running past 300 labels, curated with an eye for niche discoveries rather than the obvious names. True to the project's founding idea, the garden is treated as an extension of the cellar — a glass of wine can always be drunk lying on the lawn alongside some of the produce that also turns up on the menu.

06When to go and booking

Motelombroso keeps a rhythm built around dinner: closed on Mondays, open for dinner only from Tuesday to Friday between 7pm and 1am, open from lunch on Saturday between 12.30pm and 1.30am, and for Sunday lunch only, from 12.30pm to 6pm. The address sits at kilometre 475.33 of the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese towpath, a short taxi or bike ride beyond the busiest stretch of the Navigli.

07The neighbourhood

This far down the Naviglio Pavese, the canal loses its evening crowds and starts to feel semi-rural, bamboo and plane trees replacing the bar terraces of the centre. The restaurant sits in Zone 5, around 760 metres from Erba Brusca, another of the canal's destination kitchens, making this stretch of towpath worth treating as an evening in itself rather than a stop on the way somewhere else.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.