Sine by Di Pinto – Milan's cooking of subtraction

On the corner where Viale Umbria meets Corso XXII Marzo, in a quiet stretch of Milan some way from the gilded grid of the centre, Roberto Di Pinto opened his own restaurant in December 2018 and named it after the Latin word for 'without'. Di Pinto built Sine around subtraction rather than addition: a philosophy he traces to Gualtiero Marchesi's idea of the 'necessary subtraction' of ingredients from a plate. He calls his own creed 'gastrocrazia' – a democratic gastronomy that answers to no one's idea of luxury but his own. The room he built reflects that brief: an open kitchen, close-set tables, no starched airs. The project has grown steadily since, and in 2024 the work was rewarded: Sine by Di Pinto holds one MICHELIN Star.

01The chef

Roberto Di Pinto is Neapolitan, and his training began early: at sixteen, as a kitchen hand at the historic Pasticceria Scaturchio in Naples, where he first learned to make the city's classic sfogliatelle, babà and pastiera. From there he joined Starwood, the hotel group that took him to the restaurants Fiore and Conservatory in London, and on to the Grand Hotel in Florence. He rose from sous chef to executive chef at Bulgari, and found his real turning point working alongside Gennaro Esposito at Torre del Saracino, an encounter that sent him back toward the flavours of his own childhood kitchen.

He opened Sine with his business partner, Martina Ventura, and has since become one of Italian cooking's most visible chefs on social media, writing for an audience of more than 200,000 followers and narrating the rhythms of his kitchen as much as its dishes. In 2025 he published his first book, Viaggio tra i colori della cucina mediterranea, collecting more than sixty recipes from Sine alongside over fifty technical bases for home cooks.

02The cooking

The kitchen's register is contemporary, built on Di Pinto's native Naples but inflected by the region around it: Lombardy supplies technique and occasionally the main ingredient, Campania supplies memory. The dishes can turn playful without losing precision – shrimp ravioli reappear through the menu in different guises, one version paired with a deeply flavoured fish stew. The newest ideas are gathered onto the Sine Confini tasting menu, the clearest demonstration of what the chef can do when the brief is simply to be himself.

Insider tip

Dinner Tuesday–Saturday; Saturday lunch only, 12:30–14:30, €99 (October 2026).

That restlessness extends beyond the conventional menus too – Di Pinto has also built a fully vegetable-based tasting menu drawn from old Neapolitan recipes, proof that subtraction can still mean invention rather than absence.

03What to order

Order the fried pizzetta with courgette, marinated palamita and basil – the dish most people reach for to explain what Di Pinto does. The Risotto Milano/Napoli is a more deliberate argument: Lombard risotto technique carrying the scent and depth of Mediterranean cooking, a plate built around the two cities that shaped the chef's own path. For drama, there is the Parmigiana espressionista, coated in vegetable charcoal and finished with tomato, mozzarella and basil, a dish built to look nothing like a parmigiana until the first bite proves otherwise.

04Wine and drinks

The list has expanded fast. Di Pinto recalls starting with around seventy labels; the cellar now runs past six hundred, a change he accelerated after the pandemic forced him to commit fully to the restaurant he had always wanted to build. Guests can visit the cellar itself during a meal, a collection weighted toward Italian and French names with particular attention paid to small producers from Campania. A constantly evolving list with a taste for lesser-known labels keeps the pairing side of the evening interesting too.

05When to go and booking

Dinner runs Tuesday to Saturday, from 19:30 to 22:30; Saturday is also the only lunchtime service, from 12:30 to 14:30, when Sine offers a shorter two-course lunch with dessert and a glass of wine for €99 (read on the restaurant's own site in October 2026).

For a closer look at the kitchen itself, book the Kitchen Experience, a small group seated a few steps from the pass, watching the brigade work through the tasting menu course by course. The restaurant's long-running Chef's Table, set inside the kitchen itself, is harder to secure – the wait for a seat currently runs to around three months.

For a weekend. For a lifetime.