Trippa turns ten: how it changed Milan

There are also those who don’t like Trippa, professional trattoria, located at Via Vasari number one, in Milan. There are those who don’t like it — and fair enough, they’re fully entitled to — and it’s usually those who simply can’t manage to get in, due to the well-known difficulty of finding a table, despite the double evening seating, despite the willingness of Pietro Caroli, partner of chef Diego Rossi and master of the dining room, to try to find a solution for everyone. Then again, maybe, ten years after opening, this is precisely the problem: too many people like Trippa.

A temperamental system

And how can it be their fault if there are ten times more people wanting to eat there than there are seats in the restaurant? Sure, there’s an online platform where, every first of the month at noon (it feels like a duel at high noon), you can try your luck and attempt to grab one of the tables for the following month (to be clear, on the first of May, the June slots are released). But the number of people logging on at that exact time to snatch one of those roughly fifteen hundred covers (rough estimate) is enormous, the system often crashes, and basically, you need suerte y garra — luck and grit — virtues not everyone possesses. And also a bit of fair play, to resist the urge to run to Tripadvisor and pour out venom, giving a one-star review (“only because zero isn’t allowed,” someone writes), all for the paradoxical reason of having not eaten at Trippa.

The celebration

These people — the eternally bounced back, ghosted, those for whom the wait for Trippa is Trippa — may be the only ones not celebrating today the tenth birthday of the most influential restaurant on Milan’s gastronomic scene. The best? Perhaps. The most fun? Probably. The most desired? Certainly. Either way, happy birthday.

Diego Rossi

Happy birthday

Trippa opened ten years ago, in June 2015, when Milan was hosting the Expo (which, at the time, still annoyed Milanese a little, before the summer romance kicked in), and it has clearly become one of the symbols of the gastronomic bubble the Lombard capital has experienced in recent years. A story of rabid trends, must-be places, queues outside, “have you been here? You absolutely must!”, star chefs, frantic crunches, reels and posts, food as a collective discourse, grandmothers and avant-garde, “I discovered this place”, “how wonderful is fine dining”, “fine dining is dead and buried”, with trends that have come and gone relentlessly — all you can eat, poke bowls, Roman osterie, and gourmet pizza.
And yet, in all this frenzy, Trippa has glided through these ten turbulent years — sliced almost perfectly in half by the pandemic (remember?) — with an ineffable poise. Trippa has never stopped being successful, no matter what was going on, Diego always cooked better than the time before, the atmosphere has always remained that of the right places, which don’t need marketing, advertising, or grand gestures. Just like the classics.

Trippa's interiors

A thousand ways to tell the story

Trippa could be described in many ways: Diego’s educated-yet-popular cuisine has been praised by people far more talented than me, and many have noted how his food has gradually shifted from a macho focus on offal at all costs to a newfound plant-based sensitivity. His hits — the Vitello Tonnato (which Rossi has grown to feel about the same way Radiohead feel about Creep: they’d rather not perform it), the Fried Trippa, the Bone Marrow — have been flawless for a decade.
In short, this could easily veer into hagiography — how dull, how boring. Better that I tell you about my ten years with Trippa. I moved to Milan just a few weeks before Rossi and Caroli opened the place, and ended up there almost by accident (I don’t remember how it happened), developing a kind of imprinting, like ducklings that believe the first moving thing they see is their mother. And never mind if this mother is bald and bearded.

La pasta in bianco

My life on Via Vasari

In the past ten years, I’ve gone to Trippa at least three times a year, often more. I almost always managed to get a table — sometimes settling for a stool at the counter, sometimes begging, sometimes gambling and dropping in at 10 pm, hoping for a no-show (it happens at Trippa too). Sometimes I’d be left in limbo for hours. Sometimes I simply wouldn’t make it in.
For a few years, I collected the Rossana sweets Pietro gives you with the bill. At some point, I threw them away — maybe during a move, I can’t recall. A shame really, they’d now be like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumb trail back to Via Vasari.
I brought many women to Trippa. It was often my first date spot — worst case, if the date went badly, at least the meal was good. In many cases — I confess — I got the impression I was being used as “that guy who always manages to get a table at Trippa,” a sort of male accessory. Women who would never have gone out with me otherwise agreed to do so just to try Diego’s vitello tonnato. And I knew it, but still hoped it wasn’t true.
Illusion keeps the world going — illusion and perfectly cooked sweetbreads, of course — and so, fair enough.

Pietro Caroli

The future

At Trippa, I’ve seen actors, singers, DJs, footballers. I saw Mannarino strumming his little guitar softly. I saw Walter Veltroni show up at 10:30 pm, politely ask for a table for two, and be just as politely turned away. I saw chefs from other restaurants — famous, Michelin-starred — thrilled to enjoy someone else’s simple cooking for once, not to judge, but just to enjoy. Sitting at checkered tablecloths on wooden and straw chairs.
At Trippa, I’ve probably tried at least 120 different dishes and spent at least €3,500 (probably more).

The Tagliatelle al ragù

I’ve shouted myself hoarse more than once, pointlessly, trying to convince the Michelin people how absurd it is that such a restaurant isn’t considered for a star. In the end, I think Diego came to terms with it before I did. After all, it’s not bad being Italy’s most famous chef without a macaron — perhaps alongside Alessandro Borghese, though let’s be honest, he’s never cooked as well as Diego Rossi.
Like many in Milan, I occasionally hear rumours that Diego is leaving, that he’s tired of the city (and that part, sadly, is true). And I wonder: what would Milan be like without Trippa?

And I find only one answer:
Worse.