Aalto

Canaletto walnut and a founder's line

Canaletto walnut gives the room its first craft note; Claudio Liu, chef and founder at Aalto in Milan, set the house inside Porta Nuova as part of the IYO Group's Milan line. His work has stayed in one city. IYO began in 2007; IYO Omakase and AALTO followed in 2019, not as side roads but as separate rooms in the same practice of building, holding, and sharpening Japanese-influenced dining for Milan. At Aalto, that founder's role matters because the place was conceived as a second outpost with a different pressure on it: less a repeat of IYO than an extension with its own discipline. The site takes its name from Piazza Alvar Aalto and works from the first floor of the Solaria Tower, in a district built from glass, offices, residences, and new Milanese altitude. Liu's public record does not set out an apprenticeship line for this house, so the lineage here is best read through the venues he established and kept in motion: IYO, IYO Omakase, AALTO.

Two counters inside one idea

The method at Aalto is split by design. One side is the Sushi Banco, an eight-seat omakase counter shaped around Edomae-zushi, where the gesture is close, sequenced, and bench-side. The other is the 38-seat gastronomic restaurant, where Japanese technique moves through European and Italian ingredients in tasting menu, à la carte, and counter dining formats. The compact plan, described as 320m², makes that duality legible rather than sprawling: sushi rigor in one register, contemporary fusion in another. The menu language can be precise. Spaghetti alla Tsukemen takes Italian spaghetti and asks it to behave through a Japanese dipping structure, with eel saor broth, smoked oyster bushi, pine oil, juniper, pork cheek, coffee oil, celery, and lime-kosho. Elsewhere, the kitchen has worked with chawanmushi, ponzu, takikomi gohan, culatello, saffron raviolo, veal chop, osso buco Milanese risotto, and paccheri with three tomatoes. The wine program sits visibly in the room through a 1,600-bottle wall-mounted cellar, a piece of service architecture as much as storage.

The room holds its nerve

The room is refined without asking to be admired. Wood and glass do much of the work; warm light settles on spaced tables, and the open kitchen keeps the pass in view without turning it into theatre. Porta Nuova is outside, Milan's newer vertical district, but the dining room keeps a lower voice. The terrace and the upper-floor position bring the city into the meal, including the Duomo view attached to the house's identity, while the counter pulls attention back to rice, broth, cut fish, and the hands at work. Service is formal, but the scale keeps it near. The wine wall, the Sushi Banco, and the gastronomic room read as three stations within one floor rather than separate ambitions.

A Milan project kept in one city

Aalto matters most as part of Liu's concentrated Milan practice. The founding dates make the pattern plain: 2007 for IYO, then 2019 for IYO Omakase and AALTO. That is not a scattered résumé; it is a local body of work, built house by house. If the close of the meal has a lesson, it is in that continuity: a founder holding several stations in one market, and a restaurant whose most concrete memory may be the eight-seat Sushi Banco.