Eating in Milan — Where Serious Italians Go

Milan's food scene splits cleanly into two registers, and both are worth knowing about for race weekend. One is the trattoria that hasn't changed its menu philosophy in a century. The other is a chef who's rebuilt Italian fine dining inside a nineteenth-century shopping arcade.

Trattoria Masuelli San Marco has been run by the same family since 1921 and is now in its fourth generation. It sits on Viale Umbria in Porta Romana, a few tram stops from the centre, and the room still has the chandeliers and framed memorabilia you'd expect from somewhere that's been feeding the same neighbourhood for a hundred years. The dish to order is risotto allo zafferano with ossobuco, saffron risotto under a braised veal shank with the marrow still in the bone, plus the classics: cotoletta alla milanese, vitello tonnato, polpette. Expect to spend €46-65 a head. It's closed Sunday and Monday, and Tuesday is dinner only, so plan around that if you're trying to fit it into a race weekend.

Cracco in Galleria sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. Carlo Cracco's restaurant occupies four floors inside the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan's grand nineteenth-century arcade next to the Duomo, and holds a Michelin star. Tasting menus have run around €200 per person in past seasons, and the dining room itself, glass roof, marble floors, the arcade's foot traffic passing just outside, is as much the draw as the food. There's also a ground-floor café attached that's open all day and doesn't take bookings, which is a genuinely useful fallback if the restaurant proper is full or you just want a coffee and don't need the full tasting menu experience.

Both are close enough to central Milan hotels to fit into an evening around race weekend without a long trip back. Masuelli works well after a long day at the circuit when you want something that feels like a home-cooked meal scaled up for a dining room. Cracco works better as the one big meal of the trip, the kind you book ahead for rather than walk into.