Illustration by Fig & Ginger, drawn from the review. The venue's own photo is on its way.
Japanese home-cooking restaurant and gastronomia in Missori, Milan
Gastronomia Yamamoto
Japanese Home Cooking Off Via Torino
Milan has more sushi than it needs. Gastronomia Yamamoto opened in 2017 on a narrow street between Via Torino and Corso Italia to argue that Japanese food is something else: home cooking, the dishes families actually eat. Aya Yamamoto and her mother, Shih Chy Pai Yamamoto, modelled it on the osouzai shops of Japan, neighbourhood counters selling ready dishes to take away or eat on the spot.
The owners do not cook. They hire Japanese cooks who move to Milan for the job, and they want people with a living connection to regional food and to what parents and grandparents put on the table. At lunch the menu is teishoku, the Japanese set meal built around rice. A 2024 Milano Finanza roundup named the house signature as gyudon, thin beef over rice, with a mayaku tamago, an egg marinated in soy, sesame oil, shichimi and leek. The shop says it was among the first to push the katsu sando in Italy, and its stated dream is onigiri on Italian school lunch menus. I like a restaurant whose ambitions are that modest and that serious.
Book. Lunch tables are held for an hour, some seats are at a big shared table, and arriving more than fifteen minutes late costs you the booking. There are vegetarian and gluten-free dishes, with an honest warning that one small kitchen cannot rule out cross-contamination. Since 2019 they have also made a panettone with Japanese ingredients every year, which may be the most Milanese thing a Japanese shop could do.
- Order this
- The teishoku set at lunch, Gyudon with mayaku tamago, A katsu sando, Onigiri
- The damage
- $$
- Go
- Lunch, for the teishoku set; book, and do not be late
- Find it
- Via Amedei 5, 20123 Milano
- Website
- gastronomiayamamoto.it