Introduction

Can you tell us a bit about yourself? What town and region in Italy are you from?

I’m Milanese, born here in 1970. We opened Bela Tusa in May 2025 on Via Pietro Borsieri, in the Isola neighbourhood, together with Norma Galdamez, who is my business partner and a mixologist who runs the bar.

Isola is the neighbourhood where the Porta Nuova towers have been built. We’re on the ground floor, just a few metres from the development, and we cook food that Milanese families used to make at home.

On the walls of our trattoria are sixty years’ worth of photographs by Virgilio Carnisio documenting working-class Milan. The courtyards of the old tenement buildings, washing hanging out to dry, old-fashioned trattorias, and trades photographed as they were disappearing.

“Si mangia dentro la città che non ce l’ha fatta.”

Note from Emily: I left this last sentence in Italian as the direct translation is “you eat inside the city that didn’t make it”. It means that outside in the Isola neighbourhood, is a new and modern Milan, but inside the trattoria you are eating traditional food and looking back at photos of the old Milan, like stepping back in time.

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Regional Cuisine

What do the locals eat in your region? Are there specific dishes your region or town is known for?

The first thing I’d like to say to anyone who arrives here in Milan is that it’s not a city of pasta and tomato sauce. It’s a city of rice and butter. The rice fields start right on the outskirts of the city, and for centuries butter has been the cooking fat here.

That’s where the whole repertoire comes from: yellow risotto with ossobuco; yellow because of saffron. Costoletta (cutlet) with the bone; Mondeghili, which are fried meatballs made with leftover boiled beef. Cassoeula, when the cold weather arrives. And beef cheek, the dish people talk about least but the one closest to our hearts.

It’s worth saying a little more about Mondeghili because the name itself carries the history of the city. Mondeghili comes from the Spanish word ‘albóndiga’, and before that from the Arabic ‘al-bunduqa’ which means small hazelnut. Milan was ruled by Madrid for 170 years, and it was the poorer side of the cuisine that preserved these words and names. A dish invented so that nothing would go to waste, with an Arabic name that arrived here through Spain.

Italy is known for producing beautiful seasonal produce. How does the cuisine of your region change with the seasons?

Milanese cuisine is shaped by the plains and winter, and you can see it.

Autumn and winter are its true seasons. Cassoeula waits for the first cold weather, because the Savoy cabbage needs a frost before it’s good. It’s the dish we look forward to the most.

Spring and summer here lighten things up. Risotto remains but takes on something different. This summer we made risotto with figs, lemon zest and basil. It’s the dish that people wrote to us about the most.

There’s also something that isn’t seasonal but is part of everyday life, and that’s bread. The Milanese michetta is hollow inside, almost all crust, and you have to ask for it before ten o’clock. In the humidity of the Po Valley, a dense crumb becomes rubbery within a few hours, so the city developed a bread designed to be eaten the same day. By evening, it’s no longer the same, which is why it doesn’t appear in any guide.

For someone visiting your region or town for the first time, what dishes or food experiences would you recommend they try?

Three things at the table and one outside it.

At the table: yellow risotto with ossobuco, mondeghili and costoletta. These are the three dishes we take seriously.
This cooking is not disappearing because of taste; it is disappearing because of time. Ossobuco needs three hours, and nobody has three hours. That is why it survives in trattorie and not in houses. The day a trattoria closes, you do not lose a restaurant; you lose the last place where that recipe was still being made all the way through.

Outside: go into a bakery before ten in the morning and ask for a michetta. We get our bread from Tondo, at 12 Via Cola Montano, just a short walk from here. It’s a tiny bakery run by Silvia Cancellieri, closed on Sundays and Mondays, and they describe themselves as a “radical bakery” rather than a bakery in the traditional sense. Organic flours, sourdough starter and the name of the farmer behind every flour.

And one thing that isn’t a dish. Just a few hundred metres from us, at 8 Viale Montegrappa, the Cucine Economiche opened in December 1883. You could eat there for just a few cents, and workers who couldn’t go home at lunchtime would have their lunch there. Anyone who wants to understand where Milanese cuisine comes from needs to know that it was born there, not in restaurants.

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Daily Life and Eating Habits

Can you share what you eat on a typical day?

I wake up early. I gave up coffee a few years ago, so in the mornings I just have orange juice. The main meal I have in my day is lunch, and it tends to be substantial. In the evening I tend to eat light because I don’t like to go to bed feeling full.

How often do you eat out?

On days when I’m not working, I eat out. Going out is a treat for me, and I don’t put any limits on myself.

I go out often and like eating alone, especially at lunchtime and sometimes in the evening too. I like to go back to the same places; it’s a bit like being at home: I see people I know, friends, and I feel comfortable. I live alone, and in this respect I’m like the cobbler who has no shoes. In my fridge you’ll find nothing but dark chocolate and fruit, usually apples.

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Family and Traditions

What does Pranzo della Domenica (Sunday lunch) look like in your home?
What dishes are typically served and how long does it last?

Sunday lunch is a distant dream for me. When I think about it, I go back to when I was a boy, when there were still lots of us in the family, and my Nonna was around to cook for me.

Since I started working this job, many years ago, Sunday has been a working day for me and a busy one at that.

What dishes or desserts are eaten during Christmas time in your region?

Ravioli in brodo (broth) and capon: these are the classic dishes that can’t be missing

For dessert, we have Panettone; it’s Milanese, and it’s the time of the year when the city exports something of its own instead of importing it. We serve it with ‘la salsa mascherpa’, which is a mascarpone cream known by its Milanese name; mascherpa is what we call mascarpone here.

We’d love to know all about your Christmas Day traditions. What does the meal include, and how is the day celebrated?

I’m Milanese, and for us, the big celebration is lunch on December 25th. In the south of Italy, the big meal is eaten on Christmas Eve. It’s a difference that people coming from outside Italy almost always miss.

That said, every Christmas I can remember has been spent in a trattoria, either here or in places I’ve run in the past. Every now and then I’ve managed to carve out a Christmas for myself with what’s left of my family, and even then we don’t eat at my place; we go to a friend’s trattoria.

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A Recipe to Remember

Gianmarco has shared two recipes, both written by chef Luca Di Lorenzo, and this is how he makes them in their trattoria in Milan, Bela Tusa.

A note from Gianmarco on mondeghili: they are a recovery dish. Nothing was bought to make them. Whatever boiled or braised meat was left from the day before went in, which in our kitchen right now means the trimmings from the ossobuchi and the cheeks. If you make them with meat bought for the purpose, you will get a good meatball, but not this one.

MONDEGHILI (Deep Fried Meatballs)

Serves 5 to 6, about 28 meatballs

Ingredients

• 400 g stale bread, plus cold water to soak it
• 200 g braised veal and beef, in our case the parts of the ossobuchi and the cheeks that do not go out on plates
• 400 g lean minced beef
• 150 g Grana Padano aged 12 months, grated
• 4 eggs
• 75 g mortadella, minced
• 30 g salt
• 3 g garlic powder
• gremolada to taste: chopped parsley and grated lemon zest, in a ratio of 10 to 1
• black pepper, ground, to taste
• breadcrumbs for coating
• seed oil for frying

Method

1. Soak the stale bread in cold water in a bowl.

2. Put the braised meat through the mincer while it is still warm, together with the mortadella and the softened bread.

3. Add the minced beef, the eggs, the salt, the pepper, the garlic powder, the gremolada and the grated Grana.

4. Work the mixture hard, until it is even and compact.

5. Shape them like ordinary meatballs, pressing the air out, then flatten them slightly.

6. Coat in breadcrumbs and fry in seed oil at 180 degrees.

Each one weighs 52 to 53 g raw. A portion is five.

Tips

Why each step is done that way, which is the part no recipe online gives you

The meat goes through the mincer warm, not cold, because warm it breaks down properly.

You work it hard because the mixture has to come out compact, or the meatballs fall apart in the pan.

You press the air out because any air left inside makes them crack while they cook.

You flatten the balls because that is how the old recipe wants them, otherwise, you have made a plain meatball. The traditional version is cooked in butter in a pan, and flattening them helps them cook through. We fry them, but the shape stayed. It is the fingerprint of a way of cooking nobody uses any more.

RUSUMADA (Red Wine Zabaglione)

Serves 2

This is the one Milanese people over sixty remember, and almost nobody makes any more. It was what a child was given when they were thin, or after an illness: egg yolk beaten with sugar, let down with red wine. Half medicine, half treat. We add cream, which the old version did not have.

• 4 egg yolks
• 38 g sugar
• 275 ml red wine
• 75 ml single cream

Beat the yolks with the sugar until pale and thick. Add the cream, then the wine, and keep beating until it is smooth. Serve cold, in a glass.

Tips

Since the yolks are not cooked: use pasteurised eggs, or the freshest you can find.

We make it in one batch of about six litres, and the proportions are what carry over: red wine 59%, yolk 16%, cream 16%, sugar 8%.